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Mammoth "Metal Moles" Tunnel Deep Beneath London
Hugh Pickens writes "BBC reports that the first of eight highly specialized Tunnel Boring Machines (TBM), each weighing nearly 1,000 tonnes, is being positioned at Royal Oak in west London where it will begin its slow journey east. It will carve out a new east-west underground link that will eventually run 73 miles from Maidenhead and Heathrow in the west, to Shenfield and Abbey Wood in the east. Described as 'voracious worms nibbling their way under London,' the 150-meter long machines will operate 24 hours a day and move through the earth at a rate of about 100m per week, taking three years to build a network of tunnels beneath the city's streets. Behind a 6.2-meter cutter head is a hydraulic arm. Massive chunks of earth are fed via a narrow-gauge railway along the interior of the machine, which is itself on wheels, as the machines are monitored from a surface control room which tracks their positions using GPS. Hydraulic rams at the front keep them within millimeters of their designated routes. 'It's not so much a machine as a mobile factory,' says Roy Slocombe, adding that the machine is staffed by a 20-strong 'tunnel gang' and comes with its own kitchen and toilet. Meanwhile, critics complain that the project is a peculiarly British example of how not to get big infrastructure schemes off the ground, because almost 30 years will have elapsed from its political conception in 1989 to its current projected completion date of 2018."
At least the way that this is done, the British err on the side of giving respect to the workers that end up down there instead of the Third World where it is reserved for the despots.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
....as anyone who's seen the beginning of "Reign of Fire could tell you.....
GPS?? Underground? Cool, so my scuba GPS is just around the corner too then.
How does London's subway system compare to everyone elses? Is this an awesome new thing where they are leaders, or is this catching up to what other cities did years ago?
London. On an island, right?
Brilliant idea. Someone hasn't played Jenga, apparently.
The Wolfpack Project: BitCoin + Crowdfunding = Political Accountability
From the summary:
the 150-meter long machines...
From the article:
The 140 metre long, fully assembled tunnel boring machine...
At 140 metres, each TBM would just fit just inside the boundaries of a cricket oval.
Was 140 meters not impressive enough, so the submitter had to add 10 meters?
Wouldn't be British without the whining and moaning.
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
they build exciting and reliable sports cars, too
100m per week makes for a long commute. *Practical* transport that moves freely underground is still a ways off.
In what way is this unique? Are these machines in any way superior to the machines used to bore the tunnels for the 2nd avenue subway in NYC or the ones used in the construction of the LHC at CERN?
Seems like this machine might be larger, but is that it?
(I'm sure other Londoners will agree with me here)
I'm still baffled as to why CrossRail have decided to add a stop at Whitechapel. The place is a complete dump.
Summation 2
Call me when they can load one up on a big green supersonic aircraft and deploy it anywhere in the world on a moment's notice.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
We may as well get all of the Dune references out of the way here in this one thread.
The Wolfpack Project: BitCoin + Crowdfunding = Political Accountability
There's nothing peculiarly British about partisan politics resulting in funding taking years to be approved and plenty of NIMBYs protesting the plans!
ISTR reading about this somewhere three weeks ago, it was old news then...
Operation Guillotine is in effect.
First, they say the network will be built in three years.
8 (diggers) * 0.1km / week * 52 weeks / year * 3 years = 41.6km 73 miles (117.5km)
But then, they said the project would complete 2018... so then it adds up... but still a little unclear.
Fuckin' interstate commerce. How does it work?
Boneshaker, anyone?
https://app.box.com/WitthoftResume Code: https://github.com/cellocgw
Ugh, terrible journalism, they've buried the lede. You have to read to the very last sentence to figure out that it's a heavy commuter rail corridor, not a subway, bus, or car tunnel. Maybe this is obvious to British readers, but I found it confusing as hell.
Good to see London going for public infrastucture development during the recession. Definitely will be great to have a fast Crossrail service and add to the options of moving around London. I was standing waiting for a bus at Angel the other day and I realised all the people sitting in the cars between the two sets of lights in that section could fit into one bus (or a train carriage). Public mass transport got to be the way to go in cities like London. Could you imagine London without the tube? (Mind you it would be great if they could somehow refurbish the old lines, but I guess TfL have that dream as well...)
You wait til a superfast train connection stops there. House prices will go up again... Fast connection across London stopping there will mean it's going to go up in the world.
Crappy summary is crappy. Would have been nice to tell us in your wordy summary that it is for a rail project.
You can't count the life of a project from the date someone first thought of it. By that measure, the Apollo moon landing project took at least 100 years. You should start counting from the date significant funding began, which in this case is 2010. Not bad, compared to, say, Boston's Big Dig.
They had to add the stop because the Alternate Thursday Rule, when applied in conjunction with the Left-Hand Turns Only Method, caused too many people to end up in the middle of the Thames.
ARTILLERYMAN: We're gonna build a whole new world for ourselves. Look, they
clap eyes on us and we're dead, right?
So we gotta make a new life where they'll never find us. You know where?
Underground.
. .
Have gnu, will travel.
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Some counter points.
Sulfur (the US spelling) is more archaic than Sulphur (the English spelling).
Meter is English, Metre is French (they invented the metric system).
I suppose you would also want all other homophones to be spelled the same way, right, rite, wright, write?
English has never been a phonetic language, neither the UK nor the US version.
Bad analogies are like waxing a monkey with a rainbow.
There are GPS re-radiators that will allow GPS underground. Based on the wording, it seems like that is something they are doing, but I didn't see the exact method explicitly stated.
Learn to love Alaska
Pffft, Amateurs. Boston's Big Dig is only 3.5 miles long and it took 35 years from first review to completion.
centralized models Dabblers. In truth, charnEl house.
They had these in Ninja Turtles. Can't find a link, though.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
A job is a job, a 30 years project is a decent job security after all.
http://www.thelaunchbox.blogspot.com/2012/03/contract-one-nearly-done.html
Picture of TBM
Keep in mind these pictures are taken from several feet below the active traffic on Second Avenue.
Yes. Lasers are commonly used. It's not uncommon for two underground boring machines to meet at the center of a ten mile tunnel and be less than a centimeter off.
It's easier to be a result of the past, but more fun to be a cause of the future! http://www.spacefinancegroup.com/
The fundamental approach to digging appears to broadly resemble that of Brunel's ideas for digging the Thames Tunnel in the early-mid 1800's.
Fixed the subject for you.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
I, for one, welcome our new voracious worm robot under lords.
It's actually this guy
I'm at least suspicious about it. It makes a whole lot of sense.
Doesn't anyone remember Hobb's Lane in London and Quatermass adn the Pit?
Nos Morituri te salutamus
What's the worst thing that could happen? A "voracious worm" tunnelling near established infrastructure sounds like a disaster waiting to happen. Please, someone explain how a surface control room can keep track of a subterranean device using GPS. And then there's that bit under the River Thames...
All they have to do is wait for the mayhem to commence!
The San Francisco Bay Bridge had a section collapse in the 1989 Loma-Prieta earthquake. They're building a replacement now and should have it open sometime next year (2013). They'll still have to take down the old bridge and only Jerry Brown knows how long that'll take. It took about 3 years to build it the first time and more than 25 years to replace just half of it.
"Meanwhile critics complain that the project is a peculiarly British example of how not to get big infrastructure schemes off the ground, because almost 30 years will have elapsed from its political conception in 1989 to its current projected completion date of 2018."
How long has NYC been working on the 2nd Avenue line? 75 years? IIRC, they had a bond issue in the early '50s and finally started tunneling in the early '70s, but funding fell through. They started up again recently and currently plan for an opening late this decade for the first segment, 63rd St to 96th St. No word on when the other phases will be funded, extending the line from Hanover Sq. to 125th St., roughly 9 miles total.
Yes, it's a TBM. That's how tunnels are usually dug today, where possible. There are several types, depending on the subsurface conditions. Crossrail is using mostly "earth pressure balanced" TBMs, which are for soft ground, and, for the section under the Thames out to Woolwich, a "slurry" TBM, for, well, mud. There are other types of TBMs, like hard-rock TBMs, like the ones the Swiss use to grind through the Alps.
For wet conditions, the digging is the easy part, It's propping up the tunnel walls and keeping water out that's hard. The general idea is that air pressure does the job near the face, and just behind the cutting head, ring segments are put into place to build the tunnel wall. In wet ground, the TBM drills a hole slightly larger than the ring segments, so there's never unsupported tunnel wall.
Crossrail only needs 3 years to build the tunnels. That's not bad for 21km of tunnel.
TBMs are so long because they're a construction project in a can. The front end digs. The next section assembles the tunnel rings. Then there's a section where little railroad cars take away dirt and bring up tunnel ring segments. Then there's a part that adds new track sections for the little railroad cars, which run on a two-track line. All this has to be crammed into the tunnel diameter, and it has to continue to work while the thing inches forward.
Out here in California, we recently had a non-TBM tunnel job, at Devils' Slide. This is a road tunnel through an unstable mountain, one that has repeatedly dropped the coastal road into the ocean. The mountain is essentially a big pile of loose shale and sandstone, not hard rock. Digging and stabilizing that involved a lot of steel and concrete. That's one of the worst cases.
The Channel Tunnel was in some ways, not too bad. Most of the route is in chalk, which is easy to drill and reasonably dry.
The second Crossrail TBM, incidentally, is named Ada, after Ada Lovelace.
I've always wondered how the tunnel borers track position precisely when they are underground. GPS depends on adequate reception of satellite signals, which you do NOT get underground. Inertial navigation systems? But those usually need to be refreshed from calibration sources.
I've concluded it's all done by reference to gnomes.
Demesne, which is pronounced 'domain'!
Bad analogies are like waxing a monkey with a rainbow.
You have heard of the Channel Tunnel haven't you?
They dug from both ends and met in the middle, under much deeper water than the Thames, and were only a centimetre out.
Bad analogies are like waxing a monkey with a rainbow.
Bostons Big Dig was first planned in 1948 and didn't get completed till 2007, which makes the US look quite pedestrian compared to the rapid progress in the UK.....
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like the small one in Gloucester did last year... not only did they lose track of where it was, when they finally restarted it back on the correct path, it cut through a major telephone cable that hadn't been correctly identified on the maps they based the route on... (oh for heck's sake, my google fu is poor this afternoon... it was a major local news topic about it being lost, yet I can't find any of the articles now...)
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
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The kitchens on TBMs are pretty neat. Depending on the depth of the dig, the pressure can get quite high, and this renders normal cooking recipes absolutely useless. Anything and relies on gas pressure to add volume will end up flat, so fluffy breads, crusts, and desserts like muffins, cakes, or souffles are right out as are things that use steam for cooking. Anything cooked in water has to be watched as temperatures get much higher and you don't have the cooling effects of boiling to help with regulation.
When I was doing squid research, I got an opportunity to spend some time in an underwater lab. Pressure wasn't much higher than normal (can't remember how many mmHg) but it was enough that cooking was crazy-go-nuts. We ended up eating a lot of cold preparations, salads, and packaged foods.
Fun Fact, beer is fucking lousy at depth. You'd be amazed how much the dissolved gasses and the release of such affects the taste and enjoyment.
From the start of the horizontal bore, to the machine doing the boring - the empty part of the hole. :) They use above-ground survey methods to make sure of the exact location and orientation of the starting point. Then they start boring in the proper direction, set up the laser at the start point to aim the way they want to go, and the boring machine has a laser receiver on the back end that maintains the alignment within a gnat's eyelash.
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Most line closures are because of weekend upgrade works, and have nothing to do with a day or two of strike action that occurs every 2 or 3 years.
Sorry, I was too busy thinking of the "stone pigs" under Fallen London in Echo Bazaar.
Five down, two to go.
I hope the tunnels are deep enough to avoid destroying all of the ancient artifacts still buried beneath London.
I wonder if this will make a lot of noise as it tunnels under office buildings and homes. Its 140 meters long and moves 100m per week, meaning it will be directly under buildings for over 10 days. Maybe it will not carry noise up into buildings, but if it does, 10 days at 24 hours is significant.
all delays were caused by the French, Kaiser Wilhelm and Hitler.
Ooh, Godwin!!
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Curse you, for reminding me of that horrible movie! That movie was almost as bad as Gigli and Battlefield: Earth.
All that noise and you might just burst a few of their tunnels!
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At least the way that this is done, the British err on the side of giving respect to the workers that end up down there instead of the Third World where it is reserved for the despots.
Apparently someone's offended that the British take the time to do something properly for all involved instead of a despot ordering something to happen and having it come at the unnecessary cost of people or bad long-term consequences.
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