Highest Roof

[Mutant Lemming]

Was ambling through St.Pancras and gazing up to the roof was wondering which station has the highest roof ?..... not sure if I would count the lower mezzanine as the point to measure from (it not having any platforms and was the beer barrel cellar in the past). Would say platform level to top of ceiling. Most of the main London terminals and the big city stations would be in with a shout I should imagine as most of them seem to be of a similar height.

 

[route:oxford]

Probably Glasgow Central or Queen Street if you start measuring from the low-level platforms.

 

[John55]

The roof at St Pancras is very high and one reason for this is the style of construction.

At St Pancras there are no tie rods preventing the arch bursting out such as those in the roof at Lime Street for example. Therefore the arch needs to be anchored in something solid like the ground. This means the roof actually does spring from the floor of the undercroft or thereabouts.

The other factor is that at St Pancras the roof is almost semi-circular so the roof rises high whereas the segmented arch as at Lime Street does not need to rise as high in comparison to the width.

So as long as you are asking which is the highest roof above the spring of the arch it is almost certainly St Pancras. If it is the highest above sea level then that is more difficult!

 

[furryfeet]

It would also be interesting to know how high the roof of Nottingham Victoria was .... before it was legally vandalised.

 

[EM2]

It would also be interesting to know how high the roof of Nottingham Victoria was .... before it was legally vandalised.

I think you mean 'destroyed'

 

[Wyvern]

At St Pancras there are no tie rods preventing the arch bursting out such as those in the roof at Lime Street for example. Therefore the arch needs to be anchored in something solid like the ground. This means the roof actually does spring from the floor of the undercroft or thereabouts.

An arch that rests upon the ground may resist spreading by virtue of its abutments. As you point out the arch of St Pancras has no abutments. It is therefore tied together at platform level, which must have given pause for thought when they opened it up during the recent rebuilding.

 

[raildude]

Probably Glasgow Central or Queen Street if you start measuring from the low-level platforms.

If you include Low level platforms, would Liverpool Lime Street be a good shout?

 

[swt_passenger]

An arch that rests upon the ground may resist spreading by virtue of its abutments. As you point out the arch of St Pancras has no abutments. It is therefore tied together at platform level, which must have given pause for thought when they opened it up during the recent rebuilding.

There's a summary of how it was dealt with on pages 50/51 of a 2004 Arup in house magazine article.

The chosen solution was to cast a new concrete deck
across the full width of the station on top of the existing
deck, so that its load is transmitted directly onto the
columns (Figs 12 & 13). Such a concrete structure has
large in-plane stiffness, unlike the existing beam grillage.
This allows large holes to be designed into it, allowing
the levels to be opened up.

http://www.arup.com/_assets/_download/download238.pdf

That's a useful download anyway, for anyone interested in how/why St Pancras turned out the way it did...

 

[Wyvern]

http://www.arup.com/_assets/_download/download238.pdf

That's a useful download anyway, for anyone interested in how/why St Pancras turned out the way it did...

Oh great. Thanks. Pity there's no thankyou button on this forum

I've got very interested in structures in recent years, mainly from an interest in railway history, but it must also have rubbed off on me from my son (who fancied a job with Arup being a structural engineer himself)

 

[swt_passenger]

Thanks.

If the whole project is of some interest, if you play around with the number on the end of that URL it will bring up a few more sections of the same Arup magazine, I think there are a whole sequence of articles about different aspects of the CTRL to St Pancras:

For example http://www.arup.com/_assets/_download/download236.pdf is about bridges, and http://www.arup.com/_assets/_download/download237.pdf covers the railway itself...