Holdfast Training Services Trial Blog

Wow, this is like pulling teeth.  Apparently nobody in the office got a personality for Christmas so it remains as silent as ever, social interaction is a sin.  

I continue to learn more about sheet piles on a daily basis and have been working on a new rail bridge somewhere in the West Country.  It is currently at tender stage and as seems to be par for the course design information is scant, nothing on the proposed drawings has dimensions some every sketch I’ve done has assumed or approx in brackets after numbers.  Basically I’ve been guessing at it.  I’ve also had to guess at the likely construction sequence too.  The bridge is going to be constructed in an area where Mercia Mudstone is about 2 metres below the surface, consequently the sheet piles won’t drive down into so the sheet pile wall has the structural characteristics of a wind break on a stone beach.  In order to make this thing work it needs to be propped under the finished road surface (the rail currently runs on an embankment and a new road crosses underneath) with RC axial members, the bridge deck itself I think will end up of as a prop too but I haven’t been pointed in the direction of any of the structures team so I’m not sure how much axial load I can put on it yet, I guess they haven’t designed the beams or deck yet.  It would all work fine if you could ‘wish it in place’ as the Orator would say but it’s going to need a serious amount of temporary propping in order to get to the finished product.  This is exacerbated by the fact it’s under a live railway and so work needs to work in a series of possessions.  I’ve done a John Moran favourite and drawn out lots of little sketches of what I guess the construction sequence is going to be.  Each of these stages is then accompanied by a separate file in WALLAP to prove that it works and thanks to Eurocode 7 each one of those is duplicated for both design combinations.  This interesting part thinking about actually doing stuff was this afternoon, the other 10 hours of work so far this week have been horrendous, I still haven’t worked out if these people are actually busy or just very good at looking busy, I can confirm that they are actually quite dull not just pretending to be dull.  Looking down the barrel of another 6 months of this I can safely say I’d rather be going on tour, you don’t need to do AERs on tour.

Sorry I’ve been a little unfair.  One of the principal engineers is just back from 2 months working in the Falklands watching a jack up rig drilling in rock for a new port facility.  He’s spent 2 months in transit accommodation down there and has spent at least an hour of his time whinging about it to anyone who will listen despite being on 20% more money than he would have been on in the UK.  Civvies can be amusing.