Rackline’s Multitrak mobile carriages have recently made a TV appearance on the new BBC 2 series ‘Museum of Life’, which features in depth behind the scenes footage at the Natural History Museum in London.
During 2008/2009 Rackline installed Multitrak floor tracks and mobile carriages onto 6 floors within the newly built £78 million state of the art Darwin Centre Cocoon.
The cocoons surface is hand-finished polished plaster, bound in steel channels resembling the silk threads of a real cocoon in nature.
The new Darwin Centre, by Scandinavian architects CF Møller, holds 17m entomology specimens and 3m botany specimens. At 60 metres long, 12 metres wide, 300 millimetres thick and covering 3,500 square metres, it is the largest sprayed concrete curved structure in Europe. It offers 1,040 square metres of laboratory space, doubling the size of the museum’s lab areas. The top three floors are devoted to spectacular new galleries, where some of the oldest and most precious objects in the collection, among them specimens brought back by Charles Darwin from the Beagle voyage, will be displayed.
Rackline began the installation of floor tracks to guide the mobile bases during 2008, all tracks were then set within a 60mm deep concrete screed. Bespoke mobile carriages to hold the specially designed cabinets were then installed with completion of the installation during early 2009. The delicate transfer of all collections then took place with the grand opening of the centre in September 2009; the cocoon was officially opened by Prince William and Sir David Attenborough.
