Network Rail is delivering £160M of works over Christmas and New Year across England, Wales and Scotland, combining large-scale renewals of ageing track, structures and overhead line equipment with installation of modern digital signalling. Possessions will concentrate on key main line bottlenecks and junctions, with multi-day blockades used to replace life-expired assets and reconfigure layouts for higher line speeds and more reliable timetabling. Contractors will need to manage intensive access windows, complex isolations and winter working risks while handing back routes for the post-holiday peak.

NCE’s Top 10 most read in-depth pieces of 2025 span major UK infrastructure themes, from long-span bridge renewals and high-capacity rail corridors to complex urban tunnelling and flood defence upgrades. Interviews with project directors and design leads examine issues such as whole-life carbon in reinforced concrete, geotechnical risk allocation on large D&B contracts, and digital twins for asset monitoring. For practitioners, the list signals where peers are focusing attention: programme delivery under tight funding, resilience to extreme rainfall, and constructability on constrained brownfield sites.

Early-career civil engineers recognised as Graduates and Apprentices of the Year are calling for project delivery models that combine productivity gains with whole-life carbon reduction and climate resilience. They point to digital design tools and offsite manufacture to cut programme times while enabling low-carbon materials, and stress the need for earlier integration of environmental assessment into concept design. Their comments signal growing pressure on contractors and consultants to embed decarbonisation targets alongside traditional KPIs such as cost, time and asset performance.