Sir William Halcrow and Partners
On my return from South Africa I joined Halcrow as a graduate engineer to start work on some road drainage. Within months I went on site to the New Studley tunnel, the first public NATM tunnel in the UK for the next couple of works. After a couple of years on completion I left to join Howard Humphries on the Welsh coast for more tunnelling works.
New Studley Tunnel
This scheme was a new tunnel built alongside the existing tunnel (part of the Elan Aqueduct) which was failing and also could not be closed to be fixed as Birmingham only had enough water storage for about a week. The tunnel was to be the first UK infrastructure tunnel built using the New Austrian Tunnelling Method (NATM) and I was posted there as an Assistant Resident Engineer, looking at support selection and installation, measurement, contract administration etc. This was my first real introduction to tunnelling and using drill and blast, roadheaders, locos, shotcrete etc all in a 3m diameter tunnel
GRP Junction
At either end of the tunnel a Y shaped GRP junction piece was installed over long weekends and sealed in place, enabling the reopening of the original tunnel whilst the new tunnel was completed.
Junction Shaft
To the East of the tunnel a large diameter shaft was sunk the bottom section of which was constructed around the existing aqueduct. The shaft was supported by Sprayed Concrete, closely monitored to confirm the support and ground were performing as expected,
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Once completed the junction piece above was installed and the shaft backfilled.