The Tunnelling Podcast

Mechanisation is the most reliable way to ensure the safety of workers in any construction underground. In this episode we look at the growth in mechanised methodologies for shaft-sinking

And this technology has its origins in the 1970s, but it is one that has seen a surge in interest over the last two decades… and following that, a number of equipment models have entered the market.

To talk about this, we are joined by two engineers who bring together years of experience in mechanical engineering…and decades of mining know-how.

Guests

Patrick Rennkamp, Product Manager – Shaft Boring Machines, Herrenknecht

Roy Slocombe, Former UK Managing Director, Herrenknecht

Partner

Herrenknecht is the leading premium supplier worldwide for all-round technology solutions in mechanised tunnelling for tunnel infrastructures of all kinds, as well as for underground energy sources and raw materials extraction. Thanks to lasting megatrends and an increasing demand for energy, this market will continue to provide for enormous potentials in future.

This is the third and final episode of our three-part special looking at the delivery of megaprojects. In this episode we examine the lessons learned from two of the most iconic tunnelling projects of recent times: London’s Crossrail and New York’s East Side Access.

Crossrail was the largest infrastructure project in Europe. Weaving in and out of the spaghetti of existing assets under central London occupied the best efforts of the British tunnelling industry for much of the early 2010’s. The project is a new east-west link through London and will see the first new line added to the London Underground in decades: The Elizabeth Line.

East Side Access in New York is another rail route that extends the Long Island Light Rail Road in Queens to a new station under Grand Central Terminal in Manhattan. Of particular note are the twin station caverns… each of these cathedral-like structures are 350m long, 30m high and 25m wide.

If you would like to listen to the previous episodes first, the links are:

For the first episode, click here.

For the second episode, click here.

Guests

Colin Lawrence, Global Tunnel Practice Leader – Tunnelling, Mott MacDonald

Mark Leggett, Key Account Leader – HS2, Mott MacDonald

Resources

New Dimensions to Delivery is a report from April 2020 that looks at the role the role of collaboration and technology in improving asset delivery and the performance of infrastructure in use.

Partner

Mott MacDonald is a global engineering, management and development consultancy. Its purpose is to improve society by considering social outcomes in everything they do, relentlessly focusing on excellence and digital innovation, transforming their clients’ businesses, our communities and employee opportunities.

Our sister podcast Engineering Matters produced this three-part special looking at the delivery of megaprojects to mark its 100th episode.

In this second episode, we look at how a client can assess the scale of the task of delivering an impossibly complex scheme, such as a megaproject and supplement gaps in its skillset with industry support. How projects are brought from vision to reality.

If you would like to listen to the previous episode, or the next episode, the links are:

For the first episode, click here.

For the third episode, click here.

Guests

Liz Baldwin, Divisional Manager – Foundations and Geotechnics – Metros and Civils, Mott MacDonald

Michael Savill, Practice Leader for Tunnelling – UK and Europe, Mott MacDonald

Samer Alli, Project Director – Transportation, Mott MacDonald

Resources

New Dimensions to Delivery is a report from April 2020 that looks at the role the role of collaboration and technology in improving asset delivery and the performance of infrastructure in use.

Partner

Mott MacDonald is a global engineering, management and development consultancy. Its purpose is to improve society by considering social outcomes in everything they do, relentlessly focusing on excellence and digital innovation, transforming their clients’ businesses, our communities and employee opportunities.

Megaprojects are among the most complex and challenging of society’s undertakings. Each is grand is scope and due to the scale, none are ever built twice.

Although they leverage the resources and political will of a nation, most encounter cost and schedule overruns, damaging reputations and souring public support.

Our sister podcast Engineering Matters produced this three-part special looking at the delivery of megaprojects to mark its 100th episode.

In this first episode, we look at everything that goes in to such a project before it ever breaks ground: demonstrating value and securing funding; the building blocks of sound engineering; the process for political approval; and robust programme management.

For the second episode, click here.

For the third episode, click here.

Guests

David Donald, Divisional Director – Bridges, Mott MacDonald

Samer Alli, Project Director – Transportation, Mott MacDonald

Mark Leggett, Key Account Leader – HS2, Mott MacDonald

Michael Savill, Practice Leader for Tunnelling – UK and Europe, Mott MacDonald

Resources

New Dimensions to Delivery is a report from April 2020 that looks at the role the role of collaboration and technology in improving asset delivery and the performance of infrastructure in use.

Partner

Mott MacDonald is a global engineering, management and development consultancy. Its purpose is to improve society by considering social outcomes in everything they do, relentlessly focusing on excellence and digital innovation, transforming their clients’ businesses, our communities and employee opportunities.

A career spent working on, teaching about, and investigating trenchless projects in Canada has given one geotechnical engineer decades of lessons and anecdotes to draw on.

He now finds himself an Associate Professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Waterloo, in Ontario, and Executive Director of the Centre for Advancement of Trenchless Technologies.

In this episode we speak to Dr. Mark Knight to get his perceptions of the current state of geotechnical engineering in the Canadian trenchless sector, what it does right, what it does wrong, and what Knight thinks needs to change in the near future.

Guest

Dr. Mark Knight, University of Waterloo, Ontario

The Thames Tunnel, an 11m wide, 6m high and 396m long tunnel cuts 23m under the river Thames when measured at high tide. It is the first known tunnel to be excavated under a navigable river. And most critically for today’s episode it is the first use of a tunnelling shield, which some 200 years after its original inception is today one of the most impressive achievements of engineering.

In this episode we explore the lives of the men behind the shield. The two men who first patented an idea that would be gradually built upon, revised, honed and improved to become the modern Tunnel Boring Machine. One of those men you will be most familiar with as the father of Isambard Kingdom Brunel. Marc Brunel was the engineer for the Thames Tunnel and worked with his son Isambard to build the tunnel. The second man, who patented the Tunnelling Shield alongside Marc Brunel was 10th Earl of Dundonald and head of the Chillean Navy. A battle hardy ships captain and an expelled Member of Parliament, he is nick named the Wolf of the Sea by Napolean and the Metalic Lord by the Spanish. He himself went by the name Lord Cochrane.

Set in the West Midlands county of Staffordshire is a former Royal Forest called Cannock Chase. It is part misty, secluded woodland and part undulating moorland. As you head up to the north of this Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty, the landscape becomes tame and you enter the Shugborough Estate, some 10km to the east of the town of Stafford.

Beneath the garden landscape, dotted by picnickers, joggers and dog-walkers, lies the 700m Shugborough Tunnel. Built in the mid-1800s, the construction works left eight unlined and unfilled shafts. Now, safety concerns and water inflows have led Network Rail to decide to secure these voids, but works on the heritage structure must have minimal impact on the railway and the surroundings.

Guests

Anthony St John, Geobear

Joe Redman, Story Contracting

Colin Eddie, CECL

Supporter

Geobear is a ground engineering company. It specialises in injecting a polymer into the ground that’s become unstable. It lifts buildings, fixes cracked concrete and uneven floors, and makes the ground stronger. Geobear are 10 times faster than the normal way to repair subsidence, which involves building work and often closing the business or moving out of your house. 

Kathmandu is set in a bowl valley in the foothills of the Himalayas. It has more heritage sites than any other city in the world and is the economic powerhouse for the developing nation of Nepal.

It has a bustling society and an irreplaceable culture, but what it does not have is a public transport system. With the roads heavily congested, almost to the point of being unusable, and surface space crowded with temples, the only option is to go underground.

The problems are that little Nepal has limited funds, and no prior experience of urban tunnelling. The economic argument is already being put to authorities, but the project advocates also need help from the international tunnelling community.

GUEST

Binod Lal Amatya, Geotechnical Expert, Arcadis

RESOURCES

For a collection of Binod’s publications about the metro published in The Kathmandu Post, click here.

For further information, or to offer the advocacy team your help and expertise, email [email protected]

Right now companies around the world are competing in a global race to prove that a new transport revolution is just a few years away. Using high speed transit through low pressure tubes speeds of 1100km/hr per hour are theoretically possible, bringing cities closer together than ever before.

Elon Musk who kickstarted the industry naming this transit methodology Hyperloop in his 2013 white paper exploring the technology. Then in 2017 he set a challenge to the tunnelling industry to reduce the cost of tunnel construction 10 fold.

Former British Tunnelling Society chair Bill Grose has answered this challenge in a paper published this summer. In this episode we speak with Bill about how the cost of tunnelling can be reduced and challenges in making Hyperloop a reality.

GUEST
Bill Grose, former chair of The British Tunnelling Society

RESOURCES
Engineering Matter, The race to create Hyperloop
The hyperloop challenge for tunnelling: higher productivity and lower costs

There is something fishy going on in the Hagerbach Test Gallery, deep in the Glarus Alps in Switzerland. Today the former iron mine is a place of invention, where new underground technologies are explored, tried and tested. In one of the 80m caverns two tanks of Rainbow Trout swim around, unaware that their waste products are providing critical nutrients for an array of leafy vegetables and herbs that are growing in hydroponic beds. 

In this episode we talk to Swiss Centre of Applied Underground Technologies (SCAUT) Managing Director Klaus Wachter to find out how tunnels could become homes to farms of the future. And we explore other projects that are opening up the world beneath us.

GUEST
Klaus Wachter, Managing Director, SCAUT and Project Manager at Amberg Engineering

RESOURCES
Swiss Centre for Applied Underground Technology
SCAUT Underground Green Farming Project