Holdfast Training Services Trial Blog

Since my last update I feel a little more sane.  There hasn’t been an outbreak of personality in the office but at least I’m kind of getting it a bit more now.

Parson Street Bridge

 What has amazed me on this job has been the amount of preliminary work that goes into a tender submission, I have designed most of the abutment, retaining walls and wing wall at this stage.  Initially I thought this would be unpaid but potentially fee winning work however it seems that this is actually paid work, I’m told that civil work is usually paid tender work as opposed to building structures which sounds like tender work is unpaid.  Where the money for this comes from I can only guess at the contractor who presumably doesn’t get paid for his effort but must spend money on us in order to get a detailed design, in this case Graham.  This is a D&B contract to based on initial design by Atkins with Network Rail as the client.  The Atkins design is pretty much just a drawing with few dimensions on it which makes putting any real numbers to calculations difficult.

Things that have surprised me in this process:

• The volume of publications that are out there relating to all the stuff that I’m working on, for example the CIRIA doc on Mercia Mudstone, PD6694 dealing with traffic loads on bridges and modelling how they act on retaining walls. This is just 2 of the documents outside of the Eurocodes of which I’ve consulted about 4 different sections so far.  The bits that we practised on Phase 1 i.e. putting numbers to this stuff is the bit that the computer does the art here seems to understand where to look for guidance on parameters and conditions, interpreting the ground investigation and knowing what’s possible on site.
• The lack of clear direction, I think I mentioned last week that there seems to be a huge amount of stuff that just isn’t communicated, so happily I carried on doing the models I was asked to do.  I went into a meeting late last week with 2 associate level designers from Ramboll who didn’t have a clear picture of how it would actually be built, the tender process seems to drag a little because there hasn’t been a multidiscipline meeting to start off the process.  Such a meeting would have removed the need for me to design so much sheet piling because the contractor is unwilling to risk sheet pile refusal in the mercia mudstone during a possession.
• The point above is illustrated by me trying to work out the construction sequence and putting together sketches to show the stages.  I was quite surprise by how much was left down to the GEO dept and primarily me.  Ignoring John Moran’s repeated instructions to improve my sketching came back to haunt me slightly yesterday, at least the section technician is putting them onto CAD before they leave the office.
• STR checks on sheet piles.  So far I’ve been instructed to let the structures guys check the BM and SF capacity of sheet piles, which means in reality I’ve only designed the embedment depth.  I thought the Orator would be really ashamed of me at this point so read through some old notes and put together a quick section checker excel sheet.  Whilst this isn’t too thorough at least it gives me a chance to not make a foolish mistake.
• I’ve not seen a real check on my work so far, I’ve just been allowed to get on with it and have been expected to come back if I encounter problems.  An example of this is that at one point I had to assume the deck acted as a prop for the sheet piles, putting an axial load of about 1200kN into it, I’ve highlighted it because I figure it’s probably important to the blokes designing it but nobody seems worried right now.

In other news:  Riding to work this morning was interesting, I fell off about a mile from my house, it happened so fast I ended up in a perfect cycling pose just lying horizontally on the ground.