On November 6th, Her Majesty The Queen, accompanied by The Duke of Edinburgh, launched High Speed 1, the UK's first section of high speed railway and officially opened St Pancras International Station, the magnificently restored Victorian train station in the centre of London.

The high profile event presented a particular rigging problem. Suspended AV, lighting and sound equipment could not be picked up from the space below the final hanging position, due to the fact that this was platform area and was still in use. The rigging solution provided by Unusual was to lift everything in one work zone and then to ‘drive’ it up to 150 metres down the roof structure I-beams using 5 tonne motorised beam trollies into a position where it was dead hung for the show.

The scale of this project was enormous, with a large rigging crew working nights for the four weeks leading up to the event. The screens alone weighed 25 tons. In a world where Unusual provide temporary installations using steel wire rope normally up to 12mm diameter, the weight of equipment on this project meant that we were working with steel wire rope assemblies up to 26mm in diameter. In some cases, individual loads were so heavy that they required bridles from the main roof structure. Our in-house design and structural engineering team worked closely with project manager Robin Elias and Unusual’s production riggers to play a key part in the realisation of a spectacular opening show.