Wasn't it a case of the salt extraction ceasing? Didn't they use a 'solution' process in that area rather than conventional 'solid' mining, so the extent and rate of the effects was a bit hard to predict?
I imagine Victorian practice would (or ought to) have been similar to modern: you build the bridges - either simultaneously or sequentially or most likely a mix between them (with each trade moving from one bridge to the next) - ahead of the adjacent earthworks. The embankments between the bridges can be built at the same time (though usually seasonally, particularly if in clay as that's unworkable in winter). Only when both are largely complete do you backfill the gaps between abutments and adjacent embankments. In modern practice that has to be done with free-draining fill.
Regarding the hydraulic pump, yes it does look like it is what we call today an hydraulic ram, a device I didn't know about!
Thanks for that, it helps me to form a picture of what happened when.
I hadn't considered the weather and seasonal working. The second excavated was full of blue bolder clay, which it was said was rock hard in the dry and like an ice rink when wet.
Unlikely - construction site lighting was somewhat impractical and limited at the time railways were being constructed. You can't do a lot of civils work out in the open with oil lamps, certainly not with candles, and there would be no gas supply for gas lighting. It was very long shifts in summer, and lesser in winter.
If you try and work on clay embankments in winter you'll do more damage than good. We used to aim to seal the surface in the autumn by flat-rolling it as smooth as possible with a crown to shed water, then keep absolutely everyone off it until it dries out in the spring. The muckshift operation typically shut down in October or November and restarted after Easter.
I'd agree with Taunton, single shift but long hours. In the railway building era I'd have expected a workforce well into the hundreds, on 1970s/80s road schemes we had well over a hundred even with much greater mechanisation.
As late as the mid 1970s, on my first job as a graduate engineer earthworks hours were 0700 - 2100 weekdays, 0700 - 1300 Saturdays and 0800 - 1600 Sundays. In our on-site soils testing lab we regularly worked on until around midnight to get triaxial tests (clay shear strength) done ready for the 0700 restart. Staff overtime was at flat rate (no time & half or double time), but even so I could often double my weekly salary by comparison with the 44hr/week basic. IIRC my record timesheet was a 98 hour week, no EU 48hrs/wk limits in those days! Winter was four months of very short days though.
Actually pumping "wild" brine from underground streams in the salt seams was the norm until it was realised how destructive it was for land and buildings miles from the extraction point. After it was banned they continued solution mining - but by pumping water down a borehole and sucking brine back up, keeping the cavities vertical and separated. It's how the new gas storage caverns were "constructed" near Middlewich too.
So construction work for the trad bed would be done during spring, summer and autumn until the bad weather kicked in and tools were downed until the following spring time. Not having any engineering experience I really didn't think about that side of things, except to say I did wonder about the line's viaduct construction. I thought being say 60-65 feet up in the air in winter wouldn't be the best of ideas.
I think the masons and carpenters working on bridges might well work through the winter. For them, frost might be more of an issue than rain, as it affects the mortar.
Yes, I think that's how it would have worked.
It would probably depend on the nature of the fill material (either original or replacement). If it was free draining, e.g. sands and gravels, it could have been possible to get on with repairs in the winter, but if it was clay, or sands and gravels with a high silt content, then they'd probably have had to wait for it all to dry out.
I would expect that he'd have had clerks of works at each work location, whose job it is to monitor and oversee the work on behalf of the client, in order to ensure it's being built to their specification. The RE himself would probably divide his time according to the importance and difficulty of what was being built at each site. Of course some were more assiduous in their duties than others, as shown by some of the sub-standard work still evident today (e.g. Hastings line tunnels).
I've no particular knowledge, but there were no employment protection rules then, it might well have been hire-and-fire on a daily basis even for those who worked there for long periods. Skilled workers might be better looked after, but I don't know how formal the contracts would have been, and many of the workers might well have been illiterate anyway.
I Googled HS2 and ‘borrow pits’, and found a 100 page report on the exact subject for phase 2b. It‘s presumably based on their use in current civil engineering, and it seems to be a good general overview of the reasons for use, and includes long term restoration:
"The Railway Navvies" by Terry Coleman contains details of working conditions and hiring arrangements. I found a copy in my local library. It's an interesting read about matters which don't often get an airing.
That's some document, I've gone through some of it and it's all about borrow pits and sources of material available to build the route to Manchester.
Another good question, as are the replies.
Handling rainwater runoff is standard stuff for civil engineers, though they do need to have a good professional idea of the variables involved of geology, slope gradients, etc rather than taking a "one size fits all" approach. Installing a French Drain under the field above the cutting is a starter to intercepting it, then trackside drains to pick up further. Generalising tremendously but a key issue in avoiding flooding is not primarily dealing with where the water is coming from, but more where it is going to. You need to have drainage with a proper gradient, and a watercourse to carry it away adequately.
Really? Admittedly getting rid of water is important (a friend had a smallholding next to a canal but couldn't get any action on clearing the inverted syphon under it, so his land was badly impacted) but in normal agricultural work I believed that by the time the water is at he bottom of a field it has already left it! Hence the importance of a drain across the top of a field...