Highways

A14 Haughley Concrete Trials

Graham brought TAG onto the A14 at Haughley, both westbound and eastbound, to carry out bay replacements and thin-bond concrete repairs across a range of pavement defects as part of Highways England's Concrete Road Innovations Project. The goal was to test different materials head-to-head and record exactly how each one behaved under overnight possession conditions.

The programme covered twelve thin-bond repairs using Flexcrete Fastfill, a PQX bay from Accumix, an Axtell PQA/RP3 rapid-set bay, and two bays of Rapid Set P400 CSA from Eastern Concrete. Each material was assessed for workability, finish and strength gain: the Axtell RP3 needed heated tents and a temperature check every 15 minutes to reach strength, the PQX took four hours to cure, an hour longer than on the A120 Wix Bypass trial, while the CSA concrete came in consistently at 2.5 hours regardless of conditions.

That consistency made the CSA product the standout. It handed the road back to Graham by 2:30am on the final visit, and produced a workable, brushable finish that the stiffer RP3 mix couldn't match without a weighted grooved float. Wireless SmartRoc 2 sensors were trialled alongside the physical testing to monitor cure temperature in real time, though the team found the sensors needed proper calibration to the specific mix to deliver reliable strength data.

The Flexcrete Fastfill thin-bond repairs, covering defects from 300mm square patches up to 4 metres long, reached 25N/mm² in just two hours and proved easy to place with a brushed finish, giving Highways England a proven option for smaller-scale surface defects as well as full bay replacements.

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