Engineering Triumphs

One of the treats of my job is to visit extraordinary places, like the tunnel that will bring Eurostar trains from Paris into St Pancras. This week sees the start of a new series on Radio 4, Engineering Solutions, in which I investigate five amazing new projects that go a long way to restoring my faith in British engineering.

For the last decade I have trumpeted the ingenuity and achievements of Marc and Isambard Brunel, George and Robert Stephenson, George Parker Bidder, and other great engineers of the past. Frequently I have been asked whether there are such geniuses at work today, and the answer is yes.

The work today is different. The projects are even bigger and more expensive than those of the railway builders. Engineers no longer work on their own, but in teams. Above all, Health and Safety considerations have changed working practices. No longer are construction workers expected to walk about on high beams without safety harnesses. No longer do men toil with picks and shovels in dark tunnels where the roofs leak raw sewage – many men died while Marc and Isambard Brunel were digging their way under the Thames from Rotherhithe to Wapping . Today the main emphasis is always on safety, and the engineers are assisted by vast machines.

When I say vast I mean vast. The Tunnel-Boring Machines or TBMs are a hundred metres long, weigh 2000 tonnes, and claw their way through rock, clay, or sand, in total darkness, yet can be steered, by one man, to within a millimetre of the planned path. I was fascinated by the fact that their basic method of tunnelling is the same as that invented almost 200 years ago by Marc Brunel. They dig for a metre and a half, then stop and insert a ring of concrete behind the machine – ten segments, each weighing a massive three tonnes, are picked up by a giant sucker and plopped into place. Concrete foam is squirted round the outside; then the cutters start and the machine crawls forward again.

In a sense the ingenuity of Marc Brunel - who claimed he got the idea from Teredo navalis, a worm that tunnels into ships’ timbers – has now been built into the TBM, and today’s team of engineers expend their ingenuity on the planning and the handling of the project.

At Heathrow, several separate teams of engineers are building Terminal Five. Before they could start work on the building, however, they had to divert two rivers, along with all the fish in them. Before they diverted the rivers they had to divert a road, which ran where one of the rivers had to go to. On each side of the site is a runway, with aircraft taking off or landing every minute. At one end is Terminal Three, and at the other one of the busiest roads in the country. There is no easy way in, and yet there is no space to store anything; so all building supplies have to arrive just in time; a vast truck arrives every 30 seconds.

A delay in any one area of this complex operation can badly hold up all the others. For example in high winds the tower cranes cannot operate, which stops their work dead in its tracks. And yet cooperation between all the teams on site is so good that each phase of the operation is on or ahead of schedule.

Also in the series I visit a bowstring bridge, an offshore wind farm, and the Spinnaker Tower in Portsmouth. Yes, British Engineering is alive and well.

Page last updated: Friday, 22 July 2005 22:35

Radio Times articles, from 2003-2005

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Engineering Triumphs