HS2 is Britain’s new high speed rail line being built from London to the North-West, with HS2 trains linking the biggest cities in Scotland with Manchester, Birmingham and London. It is the largest infrastructure project in Europe and the most important economic and social regeneration project in decades.

The Operational Telecommunications and Security Systems (‘Op Comms’) contract covers design, manufacture, supply, installation, supervision, inspection, safety authorisation, testing, commissioning and maintenance. The contract runs until handover to Trial Operations for Phase One and Phase 2a. The works also require optimisation of designs to meet HS2 Ltd’s performance, reliability, availability, maintainability, and safety requirements.

To deliver an operational railway, integration of railway systems is paramount and HS2 Ltd wanted a company that could collaborate successfully to achieve common goals. This required the contractor to work under an Alliance Agreement, based on Project 13 principles, with HS2 Ltd and nine other Railway Systems Contractors.

WeBid provided bid management and writing services for ITT responses relating to project organisation, alliance working, systems integration, engineering, cyber security, safety, civil engineering, construction methodology, logistics, testing and commissioning and whole life costs. Our team brought experience of working on the majority of HS2 submissions since 2015 – giving us a thorough understanding of HS2 Strategic Goals and Objectives and extensive HS2 tender feedback to provide clear insight into what the client wants.

We worked with our client’s joint venture team to develop writing plans and drafts, interviewing subject matter experts to constructively challenge solutions and ensure the methodology was aligned to ITT evaluation criteria. We also provided additional resources to flexibly accommodate ownership of new questions to support our client. Having a WeBid appointed Bid Manager enabled full visibility across all questions to maintain the bid programme, ensure consistency and embed cross cutting themes to produce a high-quality submission.