British High Speed Railway Project Is Typically British

[Dartzap]

As far as I know, the intent isn't to actually spend 50 billion, as that includes the contingency funds.

[fgalkin]

Those look familiar - are those images from National Geographic?

Yes, these are from NatGeo.

Here is the link to their feature

http://www.nationalgeographic.com/nyunderground/

Is there a way to get the first image in a higher resolution? It looks interesting but I can't read anything.

That's the highest resolution I've been able to find, alas.

Have a very nice day.
-fgalkin

[Broomstick]

Unfortunate, as I recall them from a print version of the magazine where you could see much more of the detail.

[Ahriman238]

Is there a way to get the first image in a higher resolution? It looks interesting but I can't read anything.

sigh. I can.

Starting with the mini-article.

Urban Underworld

A cutaway view of a Manhattan intersection reveals a tangle of electrical, phone, gas, steam, water and sewer lines between the street and subway platforms. "It's got so many layers crossing each other, you don't know how anybody can do anything." says Daniel Greenbaum, an engineer who helps builders navigate New York's underground. "Wherever you dig, there's problems."

A century ago, the city delayed building the subway for fear of disturbing a simpler network. Even today, a steam or water pipe can collapse streets, flood thoroughfares, and knock out power. Deepest of the pipes in this illustration, an old brick main collects storm water and sewage drained from above.

Then the illustrations.

Utilities

Telephone lines share ducts with police and fire alarm systems. High voltage electrical lines are in (something) ducts. Steam, gas and water move in valved pipes.

(The square duct from the box is labeled as high-voltage power. The brown pipes as sewage, the blue ones for water and the sort of gray-ish ones as abandoned. The water pipes connect to a water main, the boxy duct with steam coming from a pipe is, in fact, steam. -Ahri)

Subways

Most subway tunnels were built within 50 feet of the surface. Workers excavated block-long trenches in which they built rectangular structures of steel beams and concrete. These tunnels were buried, and utilities replaced above.

(the subway entrance, ticket booth, turnstiles, newsstand and nearby parking garage are all labeled as such. Between the first and second levels of the subway is a train, with 'electrified third rail' labeled. Look carefully at the top of the second level ceiling and you can make out four ventilation ducts, which are purple for some reason.)

Now comes the one I have trouble with, I think it's all the gray space.

Piles

(something) of pillars (something) as (something) (something) steel beams are driven into the bedrock to carry structural weight. Once enough piles are in place to support a column, they are capped with concrete.

(the beam supporting the parking garage is labeled pile, ends in a concrete cap, labeled cap. Beneath the bottom train is a pipe for 'subway drainage,' and two boxy ducts beneath the platforms carrying 'telecommunication and electric cables')

Sewage

Combined lines for sewage and storm water are laid on a gentle slope. Water flows by gravity to 14 treatment plants. When heavy rains flood the system, sewage overflows into the East River and other waterways.

(the large brick pipe is 'sewer main.')

[Magis]

I'm baffled how they managed to blow 185million on consulting, already, and plan to spend another 315 million over the next 3 years... Are they paying people to make oil-paintings of every meter of planned track?

Over here we got a Government department dealing with that which sure as hell does not cost 500 million.

The problem here is that 'consulting' is a pretty broad term and the article doesn't explain what kind of consulting was done. The article says that the consulting fees will increase to £500 million by the time construction begins. That doesn't surprise me at all because essentially all of the engineering needs to be done by the time construction starts.

This consulting could include: pre-feasibility and feasibility studies, environmental impact studies, regulatory compliance/licensing/permits at all levels of jurisdiction over the entire project length, geology studies for areas with unique underground characteristics, and believe me, it goes on and on.

For comparison, the construction of a small mine in western Canada eats up $100 million in pre-construction consulting in a blink of an eye, over the period of about 12 to 18 months, and is a much smaller project than a rail line like the one we're talking about.

As another comparison, the government of Ontario is refurbishing four nuclear reactors, and the consulting expense for the first, exploratory phase is $600 million, and that doesn't involve any project execution at all.

Basically it takes a lot of experienced engineers a lot of hours (plus liability expenses) to design and prep a large project, and you don't think we work cheap, do you?

[Thanas]

Thanks, Ahriman.


Magis, I don't understand how the costs can be that high considering Germany is well known for paying engineers and lawyers very well and still we don't have that much. Our 124km new plan cost 2,4 bn total, including all consulting. So your explanation does not hold much water to me.

[Sea Skimmer]

I doubt it has anywhere near as many tunnels under urban areas with soft ground as the British plan does. It would be hard to have more without just building the entire thing as a subway.

[Dartzap]

Another costly thing which Thanas has reminded me of due to his mere presence, is that like any other major project, it has to have a full archaeological survey done before building is even started, and that not cheap or easy.

[K. A. Pital]

Gotthard base tunnel has a cost of 10 billion dollars. That's 57 km of pure tunnel through a mountain. That's it.

[Simon_Jester]

In some ways, digging the tunnel through a mountain might actually be easier. You set up your tunnel boring machine on one side of the mountain, point it in the correct direction, and keep going until you come out the other side. Granted it's not quite that simple, but that's the basic concept.

Here, you have to stop and figure out exactly what you're digging under, and how to avoid having it slump right into your tunnel, because you're not just digging through solid strata of hard rock.

[K. A. Pital]

That's why digging tunnels for high-speed rail is not clever. Why not do the good old estacades? Bridges cost less and are way more flexible.

[Thanas]

I doubt it has anywhere near as many tunnels under urban areas with soft ground as the British plan does. It would be hard to have more without just building the entire thing as a subway.

How many kilometers go through urban areas and through soft ground exactly?

[Zaune]

I don't think they've got the route fully planned yet.

[Starglider]

Now where's Starglider when you need him. How could those Eurocrats be more efficient than British atlas-shrugging ways?

The primary cause of public infrastructure cost inflation is the same as for constantly over-budget, over-schedule and dysfunctional / non-functional government IT. Namely that government purchasing departments consist of only the most pathetically incompetent staff, who could not find a job in the private sector, who have no concept of real commercial negotiation and no real motive to reduce costs. There is a self-perpetuating system of incompetent out-of-touch managers hiring and promoting more people like them, while anyone with a hint of ability or initiative runs screaming to the private sector (which in the south, pay better - much better if you get a job on the other side of the table where you get bonuses for extracting more money from government). Of course these worthless wastes of time, (taxpayer) money and oxygen are completely impossible to fire due to civil service rules and public unions.

I do not have personal experience of the European equivalent, but certainly based on the French situation my guess would be that they simply attract better negotiation & contract staff into the civil service there. Southern Europe also benefits from a health and safety culture that is not completely excessive.

[Broomstick]

I don't know how it is in Europe, but the big American cities like Chicago and New York don't have complete maps of their underground. I'm most familiar with Chicago and its issues, but extrapolate to Manhattan, London, and so forth.

1) Some underground structures were built prior to 1871, including sewers and water mains. This is important, because in 1871 the heart of the city burned to the ground (and then some, in a few spots) and both landmarks and records of these structures were lost. (Um... how many times has London burned?)

2) From 1872 through the early part of the 20th century underground building was poorly documented at best, and some of the tunnels and structures abandoned. (Last I heard, there is no complete mapping of the New York underground, either.)

3) During the latter half of the 20th century problems started to accumulate due to lack of documentation.

4) In 1992 a firm hired to do some work along the river shore in Chicago accidentally punched a hole in the Chicago River, causing it to try drain into the underground. It wasn't their fault - no one remembered there was a tunnel there. Oops. Just shy of a million cubic meters of water flooded the underground before the hole was plugged. Almost $2 billion in damages to the city infrastructure and businesses. The liability case went all the way to the US Supreme Court.

5) Gee, you think maybe we should figure out what the hell is under our feet?

The upshot is that anyone wanting to do construction work in and around the Chicago Loop can't rely on the old records, they have to conduct all sorts of studies and examinations of the actual site to know what's underneath. Also, liability insurance costs have soared since 1992. Oh, and anything east of Michigan Avenue is landfill dating back to 1871, when landfill regulations were a LOT more lax than today (if they existed at all), and stands a good chance of containing interesting/historically valuable artifacts. Also, the occasional human remains (actually, probably a lot of them, but mostly in the form of ash from the Great Fire. Except for that group of Prohibition-era cars found by/in one of the river locks containing indications that the owners' remains might still be inside). A lot of that landfill needs to be stabilized/improved prior to building skyscrapers on it. All of this drives up costs.

[Zaune]

London's probably even worse because there's stuff that probably goes back to the bloody Romans down there. We're still finding the odd unexploded bomb as well.

[Broomstick]

Yes, I'd forgotten about the leftover bombs as it's not really a problem in the US but I'm sure that adds extra excitement to excavating.

[Sea Skimmer]

One of the reasons why Crossrail is so deep is to avoid the UXO hazard; course they now found that they replaced it with the plague pit hazard. Ah well. It also gets them under most existing infrastructure, the same reason why the new NYC subway is so deep and expensive and indeed, could not be built shallower, but the ground conditions are in both cases WET. Wet is death for economical tunneling be in it rock or loose material.

The Gothhard Base tunnel meanwhile is digging in nearly ideal rock conditions aside from a few faults, which is why a complete pilot tunnel was dug. It was actually possible that faulting would have simply made the tunnel impossible, but no bad ones were found. You really can't compare projects dug in different conditions.

Even building railroads on the surface can be difficult to compare. Many German railroads are actually built on top of concrete walls rather then conventional ballast, an idea which works out excellently in Germany where hard rock can be found just under the topsoil, but which does not work at all in deep soil conditions. High speed rail needs very lavish foundations because of course, its going really damn fast (steep planned grades are fine) and so this can have a huge effect on the size of the right of wave and the amount of effort to construct it.

About the most ideal places to build rail are say, the Libyan desert, where the dirt surface is so damn hard its actually possible to lay tracks directly on it and run heavy trains over them, as the British actually did in World War Two with no ballast work whatsoever. Of course in reality you do need some ballast for the rare rainstorms for a permanent line, but the situation is vastly simplified. That's why Qaddafi's high speed rail project was so incredibly cheap, only a few billion for some thousand plus miles of track. One of the recent rail projects in Afghanistan was also very cheap for this same reason, even though it was being built in an actual war zone.

[Broomstick]

One of the reasons why Crossrail is so deep is to avoid the UXO hazard; course they now found that they replaced it with the plague pit hazard.

You make it sound like building a subway in London is like battling hazards in a video game...

[Sea Skimmer]

I doubt it has anywhere near as many tunnels under urban areas with soft ground as the British plan does. It would be hard to have more without just building the entire thing as a subway.

How many kilometers go through urban areas and through soft ground exactly?

I don't know the exact figures for that, but at last plan I can find, 56.5 out of 140 miles of the initial line are in tunnels, or covered trenches. That includes an eight mile tunnel just in the city of London, which wasn't in the original plan even partially and is being intended primarily to avoid disrupting traffic in the city during construction. This isn't considering the various branches which seem to be in an even worse state of flux.

Some of these tunnels exist for no other reason then to avoid spoiling 'natural beauty' as opposed to even avoiding noisy trains in peoples actual backyards. Meanwhile lots of the line that isn't covered is still in unnecessary cuttings to reduce noise/eyesore. Litterally the one place high speed rail should be able to save money is on grades, because the trains are so fast and high powered they can take much steeper grades then conventional trains and not be slowed down. But if you put them into cuttings anyway, you threw away that one chance to save money.

Most if not all the ground in south east England is crap for tunnels. The whole city of London and everything around it is sitting on one vast alluvium fill for example, the absolute worst sort of material you could put a tunnel in, before you even consider that the water table is so high. Meanwhile the midlands are largely limestone and clay which aren't much better unless you happen to have a very dry climate. Might not be helping that England is so riddled with old mineshafts they may have to be filling some in or bracing them up to handle the loads.

Comically parts of the Paris Metro are actually supported by underground stone and concrete pillars to span the loads over the old catacombs; though now that concrete is much cheaper then it was they just backfill entire tunnels if need be.

[Sea Skimmer]

You make it sound like building a subway in London is like battling hazards in a video game...

Don't worry, they only found 13 total plague corpses in this one.



The real concern though is the TBMs boring into such pits completely underground, the above picture is from digging a vertical access shaft via different methods, because it might not be clear it was even happening at the time, and the debris dump into railcars right next to workers. They vent the air pretty heavily, but its thought live plague could in fact survive seven hundred years underground. We shall see.

[Broomstick]

At least these days we can treat plague - caught in time the death rate is very low. It's still horribly unpleasant to endure, though.

[Zaune]

It's not just plague, actually; I remember a documentary about some sort of archaeological dig -might've been Time Team- where the workers all had to be over a certain age because anyone younger would have missed out on routine smallpox vaccinations. That was nearer to the surface and therefore more recent, I think.

[Broomstick]

Smallpox only lasts two years outside a human host. Also, smallpox vaccinations only last about 10 years. What year did this occur?

[Thanas]

The trouble is that we don't really know what types of disease were there. We don't know what caused the sweating sickness, for example and while we are fairly sure about it, we still do not know for sure what caused most Roman plagues either.