Cuttings and Embankments Revisited

[Andy873]

I'd like to look again at how the Victorians built embankments with the spoil from cuttings.

I want to keep this general but I can offer a scenario:

We want to build a new line, the starting point is in the countryside at what will be the half way point of this new line. At this starting point we need to dig out cuttings, next to the first cutting will be a series of embankments and as each load of spoil is dug out it's then tipped to what will be the height of the embankment and the level of the to be track bed in the cutting.

As the cutting progresses in one direction the embankment does so in the opposite direction, as a result the spoil has to be transported over an ever increasing distance.

I remember reading somewhere that it was preferred that you tipped onto an embankment until it was at its required height rather than tipping in layers? I think (but not sure) Robert Stephenson and Brunel preferred this method as they said it was quicker. I also seem to remember that boulder clay was used for the actual banks / sides of embankments?

If we say that three cuttings (to our left) and embankments to the right are on a downward slope for both, wouldn't you use some sort of rail track and wagons to transport the spoil? would these wagons have manual hand brakes operated by workers riding the wagons? and I presume horses would pull the empty wagons back up the slope to the latest / furthest cutting?

Could (back in the 1870's) standard gauge open mineral wagons be fitted with some sort of hand operated brakes and used by workers riding on them?

I'm just curious as to in general how embankments were built and the methods used to transport spoil from cuttings to where it was needed back in the day.

 

[John Webb]

I'd like to look again at how the Victorians built embankments with the spoil from cuttings.....

.....I remember reading somewhere that it was preferred that you tipped onto an embankment until it was at its required height rather than tipping in layers? I think (but not sure) Robert Stephenson and Brunel preferred this method as they said it was quicker......

This was the only way the majority of embankments were built in those days. To the best of my knowledge it was only after WW2 and work by the Building Research Establishment and others that showed building embankments layer by layer made them far more stable as each layer could be consolidated before the next was put down. Also, of course, relies on suitable motorised equipment to do the consolidating and dump each layer in place!

 

[Pigeon]

I'd like to look again at how the Victorians built embankments with the spoil from cuttings.

Well, they didn't always. They usually tried to get the two volumes to balance out, but it didn't always work. For instance you might need to elevate, for drainage, a long stretch of line above an expanse of basically level but soggy land. Here you would often excavate the required material from broad shallow ditches parallel to the embankment. Or you might find the material excavated from the cuttings might not be suitable for building embankments, and have to dig borrow pits to find something better.

I want to keep this general but I can offer a scenario:

We want to build a new line, the starting point is in the countryside at what will be the half way point of this new line. At this starting point we need to dig out cuttings, next to the first cutting will be a series of embankments and as each load of spoil is dug out it's then tipped to what will be the height of the embankment and the level of the to be track bed in the cutting.

As the cutting progresses in one direction the embankment does so in the opposite direction, as a result the spoil has to be transported over an ever increasing distance.

This is true.

I remember reading somewhere that it was preferred that you tipped onto an embankment until it was at its required height rather than tipping in layers? I think (but not sure) Robert Stephenson and Brunel preferred this method as they said it was quicker. I also seem to remember that boulder clay was used for the actual banks / sides of embankments?

No, you should tip it in layers, about a metre thick, one at a time, with the edge of each one a controlled distance, usually about 2m, in from the edge of the previous one. That way you get a better consolidated and more stable embankment, with much less time and allowance required for it settling before it goes into service. This was well known from building canal embankments, and some of the canal engineers called the railway engineers cowboys for using end-tipping, but they did it universally anyway because it was quicker. I suppose it was most of the time, but there were still many occasions where a newly-built embankment fell down, or got washed away soon after the line opened, or kept embarrassingly slipping a little bit more every time the inspector came to check it again.

End tipping naturally results in an embankment which as well as being poorly consolidated, is much too steep - it's basically the natural slump angle of the fill material, so it doesn't need a lot of provocation to slump a little bit more. Broadening the embankment to reduce the gradient to something reasonable for long-term stability takes a heck of a lot more material and also labour to spread it out, so they did as little as they reckoned they could get away with. Consequently most of our present railway system uses embankments which are far too close to the limit of stability, and frequently need patching up.

(Cuttings, too, they would cut as steep as possible so as to have less muck to shift, and not always up to speed on how slicing a great big ditch across a slope might affect the stability of the slope as a whole either.)

It's not that they didn't know; they knew pretty well what the criteria for stability were, but the standard they were applying them to was more like "if it lasts the first couple of winters it'll stay up long enough not to embarrass me" than anything more rigorous. The modern version of that is "paying fines for train delays for the next 50 years is still a smaller amount of money than paying to actually fix the bit that keeps falling down, so we'll carry on not bothering to do it", which is worse, and they actually write it down too as if it was a commendable piece of reasoning.

Clay, also, is a baad material for embankments. It's slippery and good at forming a lubricating layer that material on top of can slide off. Depending on variety it can be hard as rock when dry but like soup when wet, so the maximum angle for stability varies hugely with weather conditions, and also with time and with how deep within the embankment the sample you're looking at is from, due to the delays in water percolating through the structure, down to a very low minimum. Clay can also form an impervious layer and trap hidden subterranean lakes within the embankment, which can be highly embarrassing when they decide they want attention.

Photos showing the embankments adjacent to Dandry Mire viaduct on the S&C are good examples of pictures of clay being clay. Especially that clay, which goes all the way from granite to cowpat according to moisture content. When they tried to build the embankment with the material nearest to hand, instead of piling up it just splodged out sideways, and you can still see the splodgy ripples on either side of the embankment. Quite big ones.

If we say that three cuttings (to our left) and embankments to the right are on a downward slope for both, wouldn't you use some sort of rail track and wagons to transport the spoil? would these wagons have manual hand brakes operated by workers riding the wagons? and I presume horses would pull the empty wagons back up the slope to the latest / furthest cutting?

Yes, they used basically the same level of rail technology as mines and quarries used for internal transport - small four-wheel wagons on roughly-laid track, usually narrow gauge, powered by horses and/or blokes.

You're not "on a slope" simply because a cutting needs to be dug out and an embankment needs to be piled up though. You operate throughout at more or less the intended level of the eventual railway. You start the cutting by digging a gullet in at that level, ie. a narrow cutting which you then dig out sideways and lengthways and chuck the muck down into the spoil wagons, at least at first; you start the embankment by building out a length of wooden staging at the intended height of the top of the embankment, and then tipping muck off the end of it.

You tip it by having a track leading up to the brink with a stop-block at the end of it. A couple of blokes or a horse pull the wagon along and step out of the way at the last moment, so the wheels hit the stop-block, the wagon tilts up on end and the contents fall out down the slope. Get it wrong and the whole lot goes over and you as well. This is especially likely to happen if there's clay in the load and the vibration of the run has made it go gooey so it doesn't fall out when it's supposed to.

As time went on, of course, there was an increasing tendency to use locomotives for the heavier hauls, and correspondingly to use better-constructed, wider-gauge temporary track.

Could (back in the 1870's) standard gauge open mineral wagons be fitted with some sort of hand operated brakes and used by workers riding on them?

What are these "brakes" of which you speak?

They did stuff like that all the time, but when you do something like that you're just thinking about how to make it go. How to make it stop doesn't occur to you until you're already on the move, and then you don't care, it'll work out somehow. Maybe one of the guys will have grabbed a piece of wood with the intention of trying to jam it in the wheel, or maybe you just reckon on jumping out. Or maybe everyone bottles the jumping out and just hangs on in there until it goes off the end. That's not the way to do it.

They'd be doing it with the site wagons, though, not standard gauge ones. Probably wouldn't be any standard gauge track on the site yet.

Generally the question of providing any "official" wagon-riding transport to site for the workforce was not particularly meaningful in the situation obtaining, but one or two later projects did it; the Elan Valley dam construction project had its own narrow-gauge railway system for connecting the site with the full-size railway and with the model village they built for the workers to live in.

 

[Andy873]

Thanks for all the interesting replies, some good points made here.

@Pigeon, thanks for your very detailed reply, much appreciated as are all the comments.

With regards to tipping an embankment to full height...

This was the only way the majority of embankments were built in those days.

It does look that way for the majority.

others that showed building embankments layer by layer made them far more stable as each layer could be consolidated before the next was put down.

Yes, I would have thought building up an embankment layer by laver with each one being consolidated would make for a more stable one.

This was well known from building canal embankments, and some of the canal engineers called the railway engineers cowboys for using end-tipping, but they did it universally anyway because it was quicker.

but there were still many occasions where a newly-built embankment fell down, or got washed away soon after the line opened, or kept embarrassingly slipping a little bit more every time the inspector came to check it again.

Speed over stability does have its drawbacks and there are plenty examples where those embankments got washed away especially during a long period of heavy rain such as the winter of 1876. The oldest embankment on my old line was 210 feet wide at the base, 420 feet long and 55 feet high was washed away (with track and signals) in January 1877. It took a full six months to rebuild it.

A couple of questions spring to mind:

1. Many writeups regarding a specific line will state for example at cutting A, 170,000 cubic yards were excavated - How did they come to that figure? was it by simple calculation, that is, each wagon holds say 5 tons of earth which equates to X cubic yards. Each "trip" would have say 6 wagons at a time and Y number of trips per 24 hours times the number of days it took to complete the cutting? or did they measure the cutting itself?

2. If you've finished all your cuttings and embankments but one embankment insists of subsiding say 4 feet a day (I know one that did), you're forced to re-open the tip and keep tipping more earth / spoil until it settles... Where would you get the extra earth / spoil that's needed from?

 

[Taunton]

Some of us are sufficiently long-lived to recall doing Cut-and-Fill calculations at university. Anyone recall a drawing office instrument called a planimeter which measured (2-d) area on a drawing by dragging it round the perimeter.

In the event that they didn't balance, which itself would just be a chance, additional material would be extracted from what were called Borrow Pits alongside the route. This always seemed to me an incorrect name, because when you "borrowed" it you never paid it back! Lecturer on a field trip was embarrassed when actually pointing out one such borrow pit on an established railway when someone (guess who) asked how you identified the difference between a borrow pit and a drainage ditch. Which obviously it was.

 

[Merle Haggard]

Two observations:-

A recently published book Cutting Remarks - the Story of Roade's Railways gives an insight into the practicalities of major earthworks and includes detail about the working practices and lives of the contractors' staff (and of the contractors themselves). Explains the mistakes made that resulted in the Northampton line cutting collapse as well.

The contractors, having tendered for the construction of a line, were paid pro-rata by mileage constructed, regardless of the relative expenditure on different parts of the route. Accordingly some concentrated on the easy parts and were paid much more than their costs but made only token attempts at building, for example, tunnels and viaducts. When they were challenged about progress they disappeared, having profited from the way payment was made. Interestingly, this was the origin of the expression 'sloping off'.

 

[edwin_m]

Some of us are sufficiently long-lived to recall doing Cut-and-Fill calculations at university. Anyone recall a drawing office instrument called a planimeter which measured (2-d) area on a drawing by dragging it round the perimeter.

In the event that they didn't balance, which itself would just be a chance, additional material would be extracted from what were called Borrow Pits alongside the route. This always seemed to me an incorrect name, because when you "borrowed" it you never paid it back! Lecturer on a field trip was embarrassed when actually pointing out one such borrow pit on an established railway when someone (guess who) asked how you identified the difference between a borrow pit and a drainage ditch. Which obviously it was.

I assume the link below shows a borrow pit on the GC extension south of Nottingham. You can probably see on the OS map, and it's certainly evident on the ground, that they have excavated out much more than was needed to make the rail formation, but not deep enough for it to have sidings at rail level. North of here the line quickly went onto embankment or structure all the way to Weekday Cross near the centre of Nottingham, and to the south there was a bit at grade through Ruddington then another long embankment about as far as Rushcliffe Halt.

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[Rescars]

Although later than other lines, and benefiting from steam navvys and other advances, the construction of the GC London Extension may offer some useful information. It has the advantage that its construction was much more comprehensively photographed than earlier main lines.

 

[Merle Haggard]

The Great Way Round, suitably embarrassed, built a number of cut-off lines around the start of C20 and these also were photographed. What seems odd is that they didn't seem to benefit from experience - for example, the Honeybourne - Cheltenham one had a viaduct collapse before the line opened, and the G-W R (along part of the route) has suffered from bank slips perhaps to a greater extent than older lines.

 

[Rescars]

IIRC, one of the reasons Pollitt designed the class 13 (X4) 4-2-2s for the opening of the GCR London Extension was that single wheeler locos were ideally suited to running short lightweight expresses whilst the new embankments and the rest of the formation settled.

 

[Taunton]

The Great Way Round, suitably embarrassed, built a number of cut-off lines around the start of C20 and these also were photographed. What seems odd is that they didn't seem to benefit from experience - for example, the Honeybourne - Cheltenham one had a viaduct collapse before the line opened, and the G-W R (along part of the route) has suffered from bank slips perhaps to a greater extent than older lines.

This is commonly attributed by us GWR lot to the Chief Civil Engineer of that era, Grierson, who was on a considerable roll at that time with various new routes, and strutted his stuff around and had a rather long-running feud with Churchward, their Chief Mechanical Engineer.

It wasn't only the Cheltenham line. On the same-era Badminton route Chipping Sodbury tunnel has long suffered from extensive flooding ever since it was built, and still does, whereas Brunel's Box tunnel, just a few miles to the south through the same escarpment and geological formation, does not. Meanwhile across the Somerset Levels on the two routes to Taunton, Brunel's line from Weston does not suffer from waterlogging and subsidence whereas the 1900 main line from Castle Cary again has been nothing but trouble. Local belief at Taunton about the latter, from the generations of Taunton gangers who did well from innumerable overtime Sundays dumping countless trainloads of ballast along there, is that it was built about four feet too low, and is impossible to keep dry. Which brings us back to cut-and-fill. Incidentally, the 1970s M5 motorway, parallel to Brunel's Weston route, suffered from exactly the same problem, and had to be virtually rebuilt after about 20 years in a project that went on for years.

Brunel (and the many engineers he employed - he didn't do it all himself of course) are felt to have understood it all, and done the job out there on the ground. Grierson was described as more at home with the company of the directors in Paddington, or joining them at their clubs. It was also nepotism. He was the son of the Victorian-era GWR General Manager, and felt to have got the job on that basis.

 

[Andy873]

The contractors, having tendered for the construction of a line, were paid pro-rata by mileage constructed, regardless of the relative expenditure on different parts of the route. Accordingly some concentrated on the easy parts and were paid much more than their costs but made only token attempts at building, for example, tunnels and viaducts. When they were challenged about progress they disappeared, having profited from the way payment was made. Interestingly, this was the origin of the expression 'sloping off'.

That's very interesting about some contractors being paid per mile, I didn't know about that or the apparent origin of the phrase "Sloping off"!

material excavated from the cuttings might not be suitable for building embankments, and have to dig borrow pits to find something better.

In the event that they didn't balance, which itself would just be a chance, additional material would be extracted from what were called Borrow Pits alongside the route. This always seemed to me an incorrect name, because when you "borrowed" it you never paid it back! Lecturer on a field trip was embarrassed when actually pointing out one such borrow pit on an established railway when someone (guess who) asked how you identified the difference between a borrow pit and a drainage ditch. Which obviously it was.

Borrow pits - I have to confess I hadn't heard of these, clearly a badly named phrase as anything dug there would never be returned. I also hadn't considered that what you might be extracting from a cutting might not be suitable. That said there's always been a nagging doubt surrounding the first cutting on my old line, what they dug there was described as quicksand - surely you wouldn't want to build an embankment with that would you?

Although later than other lines, and benefiting from steam navvys and other advances, the construction of the GC London Extension may offer some useful information. It has the advantage that its construction was much more comprehensively photographed than earlier main lines.

Thanks for the suggestion, I'll have a look round to see if I can find some of those construction photos.

Question about ratios:
I've read ratios regarding embankments, for example 2:1 - what are we comparing here? The width of the embankment base to its height?

Question about extra land usage:
Your a railway company and your building a new line, you've agreed one way or another that you'll pay the landowner X per square foot of land and estimate how much land in total you'll have to buy but... you now need to build an embankment, you know how high it needs to be and by experience you could calculate the width of the base of it, but just like those borrow pits perhaps more land will be needed than first thought. What happens now? would the final line's land usage be calculated when finished? pay X amount up front and any extra after completion etc?

And finally (sorry about all these questions!), your building a long embankment which is broken up by a series of small railway bridges, now the chicken or egg question - do you build the bridge first and work towards it? stop there and cart spoil to where the other side of the bridge is going to be then build the bridge etc? what would the general practice be please?

 

[Taunton]

That said there's always been a nagging doubt surrounding the first cutting on my old line, what they dug there was described as quicksand - surely you wouldn't want to build an embankment with that would you?

Is your 'old line' that one through the quicksand which features at the start of Mel Brooks' well known film 'Blazing Saddles' ?

 

[AndrewE]

Borrow pits - I have to confess I hadn't heard of these, clearly a badly named phrase as anything dug there would never be returned. I also hadn't considered that what you might be extracting from a cutting might not be suitable. That said there's always been a nagging doubt surrounding the first cutting on my old line, what they dug there was described as quicksand - surely you wouldn't want to build an embankment with that would you?

There is still a wood signed as "Borrow Pit Wood" by the council tip and closed railway line at Alsager... Unfortunately it's not named on the current OS or Google maps though. [Edit - it's borrow Pit Meadow! see https://www.google.com/maps/@53.107...try=ttu&g_ep=EgoyMDI0MTAxNi4wIKXMDSoASAFQAw==]
Re quicksand, I think that what makes it quicksand is groundwater coming up through it, lubricating the grains. In a different place and drained it's probably just sand. The cutting you dug it from is going to need good drainage though, and might well suffer slips as the groundwater keeps coming out of the sides mobilising the sand.
(At Beeston on the Chester to Crewe line the earlier canal had a problem with "running sand" and one lock chamber was built out of iron plates bolted together as a consequence, see https://www.gracesguide.co.uk/Beeston_Locks_(Cheshire))

 

[Bald Rick]

Re ’borrow pits’ - this is a term still in modern use. I first heard of the term whilst stood in one, the contents of which had just been, err, borrowed for HS1 construction.

 

[edwin_m]

Thanks for the suggestion, I'll have a look round to see if I can find some of those construction photos.

Many photos and also plans on https://www.railwayarchive.org.uk/

I've read ratios regarding embankments, for example 2:1 - what are we comparing here? The width of the embankment base to its height?

This will be the angle of the slope on the cutting or embankment. The total "footprint" depends on this angle, the height or depth, but also the width of the railway formation. Modern software will calculate this for you if you have a proposed alignment and a Digital Terrain Model (essentially a database of ground elevation).

 

[Snow1964]

Attached is a photo the Bournemouth Echo reproduced of the building of Bourne Valley viaduct (Bournemouth - Branksome).

Horse drawn cart tipping muck off the end of the viaduct to form approach embankment can be seen. A contractors light railway is in foreground, and nearest arch of viaduct still has falsework. It shows how the viaduct was built then embankment added to meet it.

Picture of the Day: Bourne Valley viaducts under construction in the 19th century

The Victorian brick-built railway viaducts in Bourne Valley still stand proud today, this fascinating photo shows the construction back in circa…

www.bournemouthecho.co.uk

 

[Andy873]

Is your 'old line' that one through the quicksand which features at the start of Mel Brooks' well known film 'Blazing Saddles' ?

Good one!

There is still a wood signed as "Borrow Pit Wood" by the council tip and closed railway line at Alsager... Unfortunately it's not named on the current OS or Google maps though. [Edit - it's borrow Pit Meadow!

Interesting to see an actual location named "Borrow Pit...."

Re ’borrow pits’ - this is a term still in modern use. I first heard of the term whilst stood in one, the contents of which had just been, err, borrowed for HS1 construction.

So, if the spoil from a cutting is not suitable or you've used up all the extracted material from the necessary cutting then off you go and start those borrow pits. For me it does answer my question as to how the L&Y continued to tip more material at one very large embankment after all three cuttings had been dug out on my old line - Thanks everyone for that.

Regarding embankment ratios:

This will be the angle of the slope on the cutting or embankment. The total "footprint" depends on this angle, the height or depth, but also the width of the railway formation. Modern software will calculate this for you if you have a proposed alignment and a Digital Terrain Model (essentially a database of ground elevation).

Nicely explained, even I understand what you've said here!

Attached is a photo the Bournemouth Echo reproduced of the building of Bourne Valley viaduct (Bournemouth - Branksome).

Horse drawn cart tipping muck off the end of the viaduct to form approach embankment can be seen. A contractors light railway is in foreground, and nearest arch of viaduct still has falsework. It shows how the viaduct was built then embankment added to meet it.

Thanks for the link to the photo, it does make things clearer. Obviously viaducts can take a long time to construct, when the L&Y gave the order to start construction of my old line the first thing was to ask the contractor (Mr Stone) to get on with the viaduct at Martholme whicj took four years to complete.

So then, are we saying that if you're building an embankment interspersed with several small bridges (mostly occupation under bridges) then the stone masons etc would build the first bridge and move onto the next and so on, in the mean time the embankment(s) were simply tipped and formed towards the bridges one by one?

I would have replied sooner but was under orders to do some painting!!

Thanks,
Andy.

 

[ThirteenArches]

Not just borrow pits. Sometimes there's an embarrassing excess of excavated earth (really, should I be MC on The Good Old Days?) which has to be dumped alongside the line somewhere, which sometimes meant buying extra land to put it on. There's a good example of these on the Cromford and High Peak, where the Newhaven Tunnel passes under the A515, and the raised spoil banks can be seen either side of the line.

 

[Taunton]

The total "footprint" depends on this angle, the height or depth, but also the width of the railway formation. Modern software will calculate this for you if you have a proposed alignment and a Digital Terrain Model (essentially a database of ground elevation).

Older lags here will recall (or indeed still be able to do) all this, including averaging over undulating ground, for the various footprint widths and cubic yards of material, including bits of GCSE maths trigonometry, with a detailed contour map and bits of paper, in a fraction of the time it takes the modern team to get the procurement department to get budget authority to relicense the software which is found to have expired ...

Brunel could doubtless do it in his head.

 

[ThirteenArches]

Brunel could doubtless do it in his head.

And come up with a figure half of what it actually costs in the end... still, that's better than HS2.

 

[Indigo Soup]

In the event that they didn't balance, which itself would just be a chance, additional material would be extracted from what were called Borrow Pits alongside the route.

I understand there is (or at least was) something of a fine art in tweaking details of alignment in such a way as to make two figures which don't quite balance, balance.

Not just borrow pits. Sometimes there's an embarrassing excess of excavated earth (really, should I be MC on The Good Old Days?) which has to be dumped alongside the line somewhere, which sometimes meant buying extra land to put it on. There's a good example of these on the Cromford and High Peak, where the Newhaven Tunnel passes under the A515, and the raised spoil banks can be seen either side of the line.

Such is almost inevitable when tunnelling... in the case of a certain case somewhere to the southeast of Folkestone, this resulted in a measurable enlargement of the country!

 

[edwin_m]

Tunnel ventilation shafts are and were often surrounded by spoil heaps.

A longish tunnel was often dug from both ends but also by digging down the shafts then going both ways from the bottom. So when these were dug, re-using the spoil would have involved dragging it down the hill and along the rail formation (if built at that point - the tunnel was probably started first) to some convenient embankment site. It wouldn't surprise me to hear that they usually didn't bother.

 

[Taunton]

I understand there is (or at least was) something of a fine art in tweaking details of alignment in such a way as to make two figures which don't quite balance, balance.

I have written before about the Taunton civil engineering team belief that the 1900-era Castle Cary line was built about 4 feet too low over The Athelney Levels, not just to keep clear of winter floods, but also to give an adequate gradient in the drainage under the formation down to river levels, and to keep the sub base out of being waterlogged all winter. The rationale quite likely was to balance cut and fill, to avoid having to bring in trainloads of fill material.

 

[Rescars]

Brunel could doubtless do it in his head.

The comments in this thread do underline the ingenuity and attention to detail which must have gone into creating Brunel's "billiard table"!

 

[Andy873]

Once more, thanks all.

Re quicksand, I think that what makes it quicksand is groundwater coming up through it, lubricating the grains. In a different place and drained it's probably just sand. The cutting you dug it from is going to need good drainage though, and might well suffer slips as the groundwater keeps coming out of the sides mobilising the sand.

You raise a very good point here especially about draining water from one particular cutting that contained quicksand.

The following two links (1890) from the NLS show an actual drain / channel of water actually running through this one cutting...This first sheet shows the water drawn in blue:

View map: Ordnance Survey, OS town plan - Great Harwood - sheet LXIII.6.7 - Ordnance Survey Town Plans of England and Wales, 1840s-1890s

The second one continues towards Gt. Harwood station (not shown) and has two interesting features, first there is an Hydraulic pump, secondly this water channel simply disappears opposite Albert mill, perhaps it fed the factory mill pond?

View map: Ordnance Survey, OS town plan - Great Harwood - sheet LXIII.6.3 - Ordnance Survey Town Plans of England and Wales, 1840s-1890s

Would this hydraulic pump be worked by hand? and why have a pump anyway when the water is naturally flowing downhill? in case of flooding during bad weather?

One thing I do know, sometime in the 1950's the side walls of this cutting did indeed slip and most of it had to be dug out again.

 

[AndrewE]

I suspect the hydraulic pump is what I know as a hydraulic ram. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydraulic_ram You use the kinetic energy in a flow of water to pump a small fraction of it up to a much higher level, to feed a house or mill header tank for example.

I haven't noticed a flow direction mapped for a cutting drain before, maybe it was so significant that the railway realised it had a source of water available to feed the station header tanks and water columns?

 

[Merle Haggard]

I suspect the hydraulic pump is what I know as a hydraulic ram. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydraulic_ram You use the kinetic energy in a flow of water to pump a small fraction of it up to a much higher level, to feed a house or mill header tank for example.

I haven't noticed a flow direction mapped for a cutting drain before, maybe it was so significant that the railway realised it had a source of water available to feed the station header tanks and water columns?

Just as an aside the water hammer effect could be seen in installations where plumbing was in lead pipes. Because of the comparative softness of lead the effect expanded the pipe producing a bulge in it a few inches before a tap. To explain; turning a tap off created pressure in the pipe by the flow, which had kinetic energy; being stopped the resulting energy dissipation found the weak point and expanded the pipe.

 

[Pigeon]

...a bulge in it a few inches before a tap.

Not to be confused with a wiped joint

Tunnel ventilation shafts are and were often surrounded by spoil heaps.

A longish tunnel was often dug from both ends but also by digging down the shafts then going both ways from the bottom. So when these were dug, re-using the spoil would have involved dragging it down the hill and along the rail formation (if built at that point - the tunnel was probably started first) to some convenient embankment site. It wouldn't surprise me to hear that they usually didn't bother.

Aerial photos of the couirse of Blea Moor and Rise Hill tunnels are interesting, for the great splats of spoil around all the shafts which make them look like volcanoes that have erupted.

I have written before about the Taunton civil engineering team belief that the 1900-era Castle Cary line was built about 4 feet too low over The Athelney Levels, not just to keep clear of winter floods, but also to give an adequate gradient in the drainage under the formation down to river levels, and to keep the sub base out of being waterlogged all winter. The rationale quite likely was to balance cut and fill, to avoid having to bring in trainloads of fill material.

I don't think it's a "belief" so much, more of a fact. It always had had problems, and they raised the level a bit when they put the cut-off through to Castle Cary, but not enough; they didn't really think it was enough at the time, but they were running out of money and/or patience to make a proper job of it.

 

[Taunton]

I don't think it's a "belief" so much, more of a fact. It always had had problems, and they raised the level a bit when they put the cut-off through to Castle Cary, but not enough; they didn't really think it was enough at the time, but they were running out of money and/or patience to make a proper job of it.

Chief civil Grierson got very substantial investment funds out of the GWR board for all the 1900 new lines built, but someone along the way didn't seem to understand drainage, hence the multiple issues, which to an extent continue on those various new lines even now.

Trainload after trainload of ballast from Stoneycombe, and later Meldon, quarries have been tipped in around Athelney/Langport over many years. I wonder where it all is.

I recall from Crewe to Sandbach on the Manchester line in the 1970s-80s had major subsidence issues from adjacent salt mining. Nowadays you would never know it, all is stable. How did they do it?
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