Vegas & The Aftermath - Diary

[Royal Flush]

13.4.7.1 Becomes unable to perform his duties by reason of mental or physical ill-health.

13.4.7.2 Dies.[/b]

Does the first not cover the 2nd?

[raab11]

channel tunnel(best thing out of england since the m1?)

itaipu dam(5x bigger than the hoover dam)

[bobby1]

Tony,

What do you know about the tube system in London? Everytime I travel on it I wonder how the hell they made something so big and widereaching in days gone by.

It's THE most wondrous piece of (mostly) Victorian Civil Engineerring you could ever wish to see Phil. I could write pages & pages about it, & I cannot use it without being in awe of those who originally designed & built it. Nearly a billion people per year use it nowadays.

Passengers moan about it - everyone moans about everything these days - but it did suffer from lack of Investment during the period 1960 to 1990. Since then, almost the only blot on Mayor Livigstone's copybook has been his disastrous & now reversed decision to let the Upgrade Programme to the hapless & now defunct Metro-Net outfit, who were wholly overwhelmed by the sudden influx of work.

But it's very much better now than 30 or even 20 years ago. MUCH cleaner - Stations, Platforms & Rolling Stock, & they have got one very important thing Spot-On - communication. At every Station, every hour of every day, there is a "Service Update Board". Excellent.

Safety - there can barely be a safer mass-transportation system in the world. Exclude "Passenger Incidents" (folks falling under Trains) from that, & the death rate is barely recordable.

Regularity & Serrvice Frequency - SO much better than even 20 years ago. On the busier lines - Central, Victoria, Northern, Jubillee, etc, they run as closely as every 2 minutes most of the day. The Signalling system to cope with that alone is something special.

Maintenance & Design of infrastructure & rolling-stock is superb. The Seats need to be super-tough due to low-lifes abusing them, feet on seats etc, but you never even see chafed upholstery. The new Central Line stock has those high windows giving much better vision. The old Stations, particularly on the Piccadilly & Northern Lines are Listed Structures, being so beautiful, many of them recognized Art-Deco. The architecture on the new Jubilee Line is spectacular, & the materials - mainly glass & aluminium - has a maintenance-free design life of hundreds of years.

As tp the Trains, give how many operate daily, the mechanical reliability is almost 100%. Compare that to the modern-day Main Line Virgin & Midland Mainline plastic shite.

Tunneling "back in the day" was incomprehensibly complex, with Tube Lines passing over & under each other Underground, as well as having to dodge major utility Services (gas, leccy) & of course, the London Sewer System.

The Victoria Line - I recall it first opening - has revitalised huge areas of East London, & it's wonderfully reliable, & faster than ANY means of Transport in London.

I do wonder where all the money goes. The Services are packed to capacity, 12 of the 18 hours per day it's open, & it's quite expensive "per head" to travel on nowadays, so their income must be absolutely huge. I expect bureaucracy soaks up much of it.

It's an absolute engineering miracle of reliability & safety. Few Londoners realise it, but they are incedibly lucky to have it. To be fair, the Paris Metro is pretty impressive, as is the Moscow Underground. I've not yet experienced the New York Subway System, but it's on my "before I die" List.

Cheers Tony,

As a construction man I was wondering if you knew how they could build something like that in those times. How would you go about tunnelling and structuring an underground line and do you know how long it would have taken to build just one of the main tunnel lines?

[kenjude]

Dubai??

The Dubai constructions don't exactly enhance the planet do they? Impressive feats of engineering, no doubt, but building them out into the Gulf like that? Yuk. IMO.

[boldie]

Dubai??

The Dubai constructions don't exactly enhance the planet do they? Impressive feats of engineering, no doubt, but building them out into the Gulf like that? Yuk. IMO.

they also buggered it up at first as they didn't take into account that by building all those islands they would interrupt the tides. So they found that the water between the islands became stagnant (not good)..they are now/ have now put in massive water pumps to keep the water flowing. It's like a giant fish tank...well without fish...maybe, I dunno if there are any fish there..but thought the water pumps  were kindoff cool.

[Jon MW]

... How would you go about tunnelling and structuring an underground line ...

Cut and cover is the boring method - dig a trench and then put a roof on it.

The tunnel shield is more interesting as the precursor of boring machines -


More technical people might be able to fill in the gaps - I mainly just liked the picture.

[tikay]

Tony,

What do you know about the tube system in London? Everytime I travel on it I wonder how the hell they made something so big and widereaching in days gone by.

It's THE most wondrous piece of (mostly) Victorian Civil Engineerring you could ever wish to see Phil. I could write pages & pages about it, & I cannot use it without being in awe of those who originally designed & built it. Nearly a billion people per year use it nowadays.

Passengers moan about it - everyone moans about everything these days - but it did suffer from lack of Investment during the period 1960 to 1990. Since then, almost the only blot on Mayor Livigstone's copybook has been his disastrous & now reversed decision to let the Upgrade Programme to the hapless & now defunct Metro-Net outfit, who were wholly overwhelmed by the sudden influx of work.

But it's very much better now than 30 or even 20 years ago. MUCH cleaner - Stations, Platforms & Rolling Stock, & they have got one very important thing Spot-On - communication. At every Station, every hour of every day, there is a "Service Update Board". Excellent.

Safety - there can barely be a safer mass-transportation system in the world. Exclude "Passenger Incidents" (folks falling under Trains) from that, & the death rate is barely recordable.

Regularity & Serrvice Frequency - SO much better than even 20 years ago. On the busier lines - Central, Victoria, Northern, Jubillee, etc, they run as closely as every 2 minutes most of the day. The Signalling system to cope with that alone is something special.

Maintenance & Design of infrastructure & rolling-stock is superb. The Seats need to be super-tough due to low-lifes abusing them, feet on seats etc, but you never even see chafed upholstery. The new Central Line stock has those high windows giving much better vision. The old Stations, particularly on the Piccadilly & Northern Lines are Listed Structures, being so beautiful, many of them recognized Art-Deco. The architecture on the new Jubilee Line is spectacular, & the materials - mainly glass & aluminium - has a maintenance-free design life of hundreds of years.

As tp the Trains, give how many operate daily, the mechanical reliability is almost 100%. Compare that to the modern-day Main Line Virgin & Midland Mainline plastic shite.

Tunneling "back in the day" was incomprehensibly complex, with Tube Lines passing over & under each other Underground, as well as having to dodge major utility Services (gas, leccy) & of course, the London Sewer System.

The Victoria Line - I recall it first opening - has revitalised huge areas of East London, & it's wonderfully reliable, & faster than ANY means of Transport in London.

I do wonder where all the money goes. The Services are packed to capacity, 12 of the 18 hours per day it's open, & it's quite expensive "per head" to travel on nowadays, so their income must be absolutely huge. I expect bureaucracy soaks up much of it.

It's an absolute engineering miracle of reliability & safety. Few Londoners realise it, but they are incedibly lucky to have it. To be fair, the Paris Metro is pretty impressive, as is the Moscow Underground. I've not yet experienced the New York Subway System, but it's on my "before I die" List.

Cheers Tony,

As a construction man I was wondering if you knew how they could build something like that in those times. How would you go about tunnelling and structuring an underground line and do you know how long it would have taken to build just one of the main tunnel lines?

Here's a piece I found which may interest you Phil.

The first underground lines, the Metropolitan, District and Circle, ran just below the surface. Building sub-surface lines was costly and caused massive disruption to streets, buildings and mains services. In 1870, a new kind of underground railway was built, using a deep tunnel bored through the soft but watertight London clay. This was the first of the "tubes".


 
Building tubes was possible thanks to the tunnelling shield, invented in 1818 by Marc Brunel, a royalist exile from revolutionary France, and the father of Isambard Kingdom Brunel. Inspired by watching a shipworm bore through timber, Brunel built a shield consisting of 12 rectangular cast-iron frames, arranged side by side, which acted as a temporary support for a tunnel. Each frame was 3ft wide and 12ft high, and had three vertical cells, in which the miners stood. They would remove a few inches of soil in front of them, and then the shield would be moved forward. Builders followed behind, lining the tunnel walls with brick. Brunel used his shield to build a tunnel beneath the Thames, which opened for pedestrians in 1843.


Brunel's shield was improved by James Gatehead and Peter Barlow, who made it circular and simpler in construction. In 1870, they used it to build the very first tube railway, crossing the Thames from Tower Hill to Bermondsey. Steam could not be used in an enclosed tube, and so the trains were pulled on cables driven by stationary steam engines. This first tube only operated for a few months, but it showed the potential of deep tunnels.

The Northern Line

In 1884, James Gatehead set up a new railway company to build a tube 40ft below the surface, linking King William Street in the City with Southwark, south of the river. The City and South London line, today known as the Northern Line, opened in 1890. This was the world's first underground electric railway, using trains with three small cars, nicknamed "padded cells" because they were upholstered to the ceiling. Electric trains were much cleaner than the steam trains used on the sub-surface lines, and they charged a flat fare (unlike the Circle line, which continued to sell first-class tickets until 1940).



The Tube was quick, clean and cheap, and immediately popular. By 1891, 15,000 passengers a day were travelling on the line. It was then extended north to Moorgate (1900), the Angel (1901) and King's Cross (1903). A southern extension to Clapham Common opened in 1900. In 1905, 51.5 million passengers travelled on the tube, which was now 18 miles long.



The Twopenny Tube
The success of the Northern line led to more tubes being built. The first really modern one was the Central Line between the Bank of England and Shepherd's Bush, which opened on July 30, 1900. Crimson electric trains pulled smart passenger cars through white painted tunnels, 60-110ft below the surface, and reached by electric lifts. It was popular with workers and shoppers by day and theatre-goers by night - all charged a flat fare of 2 d. Londoners nicknamed the line the ''Twopenny tube"

Tube Empire

 
The early 1900s saw the creation of a railway empire by the American financier, Charles Tyson Yerkes. In 1901, he bought the District line, converting it from steam to electricty. From 1902-5 he built a huge power station at Lot's Road, Chelsea, to provide the electricity. Yerkes then built a new tube line, the Baker Street and Waterloo railway, known as the Bakerloo, a nickname invented by the Evening News when it opened in March 1906. The Railway Magazine, disapproving of rich American railway owners, wrote, "For a railway to adopt its gutter title is not what we expect of a railway company. English railway officers have more dignity than to act in this way."

Yerkes's next tube was the Piccadilly Line, from Finsbury Park to Hammersmith, which opened in December 1906. The soil excavated from the tunnels was used to build the terraces at Chelsea's ground, Stamford Bridge. The Piccadilly Line was the first to have an electric escalator, installed at Earl's Court in 1911. At first, the public distrusted the escalator. To reassure people that the it was safe, a man with a wooden leg, called "Bumper" Harris, was hired to travel up and down it continuously for a week!

Yerkes died in 1905, two years before his final line, the Hampstead Tube (now part of the Northern line), was completed. Known as the "last link", it opened on January 23, 1907.

Unification

Yerkes showed that single ownership of several lines led to improved services, with better interchanges. This realisation led to a 1933 Act of Parliament establishing the London Passenger Transport Board, to co-ordinate the various tram, bus and Underground services. The Board took over five railway companies, 17 tramways and 61 bus companies. Now large-scale planning could begin for the Underground, with the widening of tunnels, lengthening of platforms and introduction of new rolling stock and escalators across the network.


The lines were also extended, and two new ones built, the Victoria (1960-9) and Jubilee (1970-9). Today's Underground has 253 miles of railway and 274 stations. Each year, around 276 million passengers travel on the network, which is the largest in the world.






 

[kinboshi]

... How would you go about tunnelling and structuring an underground line ...

Cut and cover is the boring method - dig a trench and then put a roof on it.

The tunnel shield is more interesting as the precursor of boring machines -


More technical people might be able to fill in the gaps - I mainly just liked the picture.

Well, it's the usual way of making a hole.

[tikay]

So it was Marc Brunel who came up with the idea of a tunneling shield, & he used his then 19 year old son & progidy, Isambard Kingdom Brunel, to suupervise Construction of the Thames Tunnel.

It was originally a pedestrian Tunnel, designed for Horse & Carts to be able to traverse, but it fell into disuse after about 30 years, & was purchased by a Private Train Company to use as part of an Underground Train Line. That was eventually to become the East London Line, in daily use until March of this year. Then, the whole line was closed, to enable construction of the new upgraded, £1 billion pound East London Line, to be ready in time for the 2012 Olympics.

Engineers were shocked earlier this year when they started to survey the Tunnel at close quarters.

"Victorian brickwork - particularly the early brickwork - was of a tremendous standard," explains Barrie Noble, construction manager for Transport for London, who is working on the building of the new railway.

"We don't intend to do anything to interfere with the fabric of the tunnel," he says. "Brunel and his team and his workmen were excellent."

It was, as Mr Noble says, "a long way before its time". With no giant cutting tools, it meant 36 miners, each in his own cell in the shield, removed oak planks one at a time and cut the soil behind to a depth of four inches.

So, 150 years on, it remains totally fit for purpose.

In assessing what goes in Jim's Seven Civil Engineering Wonders of the World, those are the Standards - functionality, & design life. So, no to that Dubai "island".

[Karabiner]

Construction was completed in 1643

As a token of his esteem and gratitude, the king or maharajah who had commissioned the Taj Mahal had the architect's eyes put out in order that he could never build anything to surpass it's beauty in the future.

[tikay]

An artists impression of a flood during the construction of the Thames Tunnel which killed 7 men.

[tikay]

Construction was completed in 1643

As a token of his esteem and gratitude, the king or maharajah who had commissioned this had the architect's eyes put out in order that he could never build anything to surpass it's beauty in the fiuture.

Wow! Really?

[tikay]

A segment of the Brunel Tunneling Shield. There would be 4 of these, side by side, "houising" 36 men, one in each compartment.

[tikay]

.

[77dave]

Construction was completed in 1643

As a token of his esteem and gratitude, the king or maharajah who had commissioned this had the architect's eyes put out in order that he could never build anything to surpass it's beauty in the fiuture.

Wow! Really?

The man that created the Osmington White Horse committed suicide upon its completion.
It was made as a tribute to King George III in 1808 who was a regular visitor to Weymouth.
The reason he committed suicide is cos he had the King riding out of town instead of into town as intended.