Balfour Beatty has acquired railway surveying equipment manufacturer Omnicom Engineering.
Balfour Beatty said that the acquisition will enhance its position in the rail market of the UK and will expand the global reach of Omnicom Engineering’s asset monitoring systems.
Omnicom Engineering, founded in 1995, is a UK firm that specialises in developing vehicle borne software and hardware platforms for asset survey, inspection and monitoring. The business is based in York and Derby, with clients including Network Rail in the UK and Australia’s largest rail freight operator, Aurizon.
Omnicom Engineering specialises in video and laser surveys, as well as high-speed video inspection, such as OmniVision which allows clients to replace manual track inspection with automated machine vision from a high speed vehicle. Eight hours of data can be captured at speeds over 160km/h and processed within 48 hours.
Among Balfour Beatty’s existing systems are high -speed laser and inertial measurement of track geometry, infrastructure gauge, points condition monitoring and software solutions to visualise condition and support asset management decisions.
Managing Director of Balfour Beatty’s UK rail business, Mark Bullock, commented: “Omnicom Engineering is a true innovator which is benefiting from over 20 years of investment in research and development.
“We will leverage this expertise alongside the high speed laser measurement technology that already exists within Balfour Beatty, to provide unrivalled technical solutions to clients in the growing high-speed and unattended data collection market in which we see opportunities for increasing our business.
“Together, Omnicom and Balfour Beatty’s range of asset management solutions will offer an unrivalled richness of information to support the maintenance of roads and railways across the world.”
Meanwhile, last month Balfour Beatty started work on the construction of a 19 storey tower in Portland in the US state of Oregon.
The tower for BPM Real Estate will be home to a 180-room Radisson Red hotel and will also have 175,000 square feet of office space and over 2,000 square feet of ground-floor retail space.
