Highways England has said a new resurfacing method has seen four times more road surface being laid in one night than an average shift, breaking an internal record.
The new tactic involves getting the preparation work for the total section of road finished in one night, then resurfacing work is completed the next night rather than stretching the project out into smaller sections over more days.
An average of 163.7 tonnes of road surface was laid every hour
A total of 13,200 square metres of tarmac was laid in one night – the equivalent of 2 rugby pitches.
As part of a trial last month, a single crew from contractors Balfour Beatty Mott MacDonald laid over 1,100 tonnes of road surface on a 2 mile stretch of the M6.
John Lyssejko, project manager at Highways England, said: ‘We’re keen to do things differently, maintain high standards and reduce the impact on drivers and this new method of working ticks every box.
‘Now we know how well it works, and we are confident that we can maintain safety, we can start to look to use the method elsewhere on the network.’
All of the preparation work took place on a Friday night, including planing off the existing road surface and repairing deep cracks and potholes.
A lane closure was kept in place during the day on the Saturday to protect the unfinished road surface and meant crews could focus entirely on laying the new 50mm deep tarmac on the Saturday night.
The Government-owned company said the normal method of working would have required workers to be out on the motorway for seven nights to allow small sections to be repaired each night.
It said the new approach meant all the work could be completed over two nights, including replacing all road markings, reflective road studs and traffic level detectors in the road surface.
The crew laid an average of 163.7 tonnes of road surface every hour with a total of 1146.3 tonnes laid during the Saturday night shift.
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