In the days of British Rail, research into railway matters was all tied up. There was British Rail Research and that was it! Actually the organisation didn’t do a bad job, and many engineers around the network had great respect for their colleagues in Derby. As privatisation approached, this all...
Rail Engineer has visited the new Crossrail Farringdon station site before (issue 118, August 2014) and has looked at the working of the tunnel boring machines (TBMs). However, the latest visit to Farringdon was a bit different to either previous experience. This time the TBM was not in a cutting...
The city of Auckland, home to the world’s largest Polynesian population and known to the Maori as Tamaki Makaurau, is the biggest in New Zealand. Currently about the same size as Birmingham in the UK, it has a population of about 1.4 million occupying an urban area of almost 426...
When Paul Baker of Hochtief Murphy Joint Venture (HMJV) was kind enough to invite me to visit the Plumstead portal of the Crossrail Thames Tunnels I was delighted. I spent most of my career maintaining Victorian rail tunnels, and have visited the interior of some more modern tunnels such as the Channel Tunnel, but I [...]
The £14.8 billion Crossrail project involves a phenomenal amount of tunnelling work, as might be expected of a new rail link crossing a major metropolis like London. The statistics are worth revisiting. The project includes 21 km of twin 6.2 metre internal diameter tunnels and 37 stations, of which eight will be below ground. In [...]