Difficulties building your railway line

[Andy873]

Thanks to @Senex I was able to compare notes between my L&Y Society book on the North Lancashire Loop Line and what John Marshall had to say about it.

I knew there were severe difficulties but Marshall highlights them in more detail...

Three major cutting were needed West of Great Harwood station whilst 2 miles of embankments were required East of the station towards Simonstone i.e. roughly either side of the river Calder.

The landscape is generally downhill from the Blackburn end to the river.

680,000 cubic yards were excavated from these three cuttings and had to be moved to the East of GH station to construct the embankments.

Moving East of GH station towards the river:

The embankment near Duxbury Wood (just East of the station) broke into old coal workings and had to be repaired along with an old culvert which had to be rebuilt.

The embankment near Copy Wood (next to Martholme colliery) was 40 feet high and the weight pushed down clay on which it stood. They had to keep tipping earth until it finally settled.

The embankment at Martholme itself, although finished continued to subside at a rate of four feet a day. It eventually settled down after using 680,000 cubic yards of Earth.

Finally on the 1st of January 1877 a landslide washed away the embankment, track and signalling at Duxbury Wood just as the line was finally complete. It took 6 months to repair this and was at its highest 55 feet.

Questions:

1. How do you move such a large amount of earth a few miles to where it is needed in the 1870's?

2. What difficulties did they encounter when building your old favourite line? And how did they solve them?

The L&Y planned to open the loop line in 1871, but because of the above difficulties it took a further 6 years to do so and cost around 45,000 pounds extra.

Thaanks,
Andy.

 

[GRALISTAIR]

Well I will watch this thread with interest. My own line is the WCML so plenty of material to post about later. Great thread idea btw

 

[ac6000cw]

1. How do you move such a large amount of earth a few miles to where it is needed in the 1870's?

Narrow gauge temporary railway, I'd guess. Lots of quarries etc. used those, with track that got moved around as needed - lightweight track and vehicles that could cope with execrable track quality!

 

[John Webb]

Civil Engineering on lines after the early years of railways usually started off with the survey of the course of the line and the surveyor would attempt to balance, as much as possible, what needed to be dug out to form cuttings with what was needed to form embankments. Construction would start at a level spot, fairly obviously, and the contractor would lay a temporary line (often narrow gauge as mentioned by ac6000cw above) to transport soil taken out from a cutting to where it was needed to form an embankment. Others would be building the bridges, usually to start with the ones which took the railway over things and to which the embankment would be built towards. The contractors railway would often use short steep inclines of a temporary nature, possibly with end-tipping wagons to dump soil where the embankment was being built.
Much of the digging would still be by hand; by the 1880s there were mechanical excavators as shown by their deployment on the building of the Manchester Ship Canal. Photography was becoming common, as witnessed by the photographs showing the construction of the Settle-Carlisle line 1869-76. It may be that there are pictures of the construction of your line through Great Harwood?

 

[Andy873]

Thanks.

(often narrow gauge as mentioned by ac6000cw above)

Yes that looks like the most probable way to do it, especially as the spoil had to be moved around three miles.

It may be that there are pictures of the construction of your line through Great Harwood?

Sadly I've not come across any, but you never know...

According to Network Rail and other engineers, they say that the finished embankments were often built too steep to save on the amount of earth needed.

Also, they say more or less anything was used not just earth. Rock, clay, rubble etc was common and was based on what they had to hand / excavated elsewhere. The engineers of the time were learning as they went along and these embankments weren't consolidated as much as they would be today.

The L&Y ran goods trains only from the start of June 1877 to September to try to consolidate the embankments as much as they could i.e. before running passenger trains from September.

One interesting side note:

Before the line was allowed to run passenger services a Major General for the Board of Trade conducted some tests which included:

1. He got two 40 ton engines together to run the line to test the bridges strength.

2. At GH station (higher up than the next station - Simonstone) he let a loaded wagon roll out of GH to see if a runaway wagon would reach Simonstone station. It stopped half a mile away before the station on the long flat section.

 

[DelW]

According to Network Rail and other engineers, they say that the finished embankments were often built too steep to save on the amount of earth needed.

Also, they say more or less anything was used not just earth. Rock, clay, rubble etc was common and was based on what they had to hand / excavated elsewhere. The engineers of the time were learning as they went along and these embankments weren't consolidated as much as they would be today.

I've mentioned elsewhere on these forums that in the late 1970s I was involved in removing an abandoned branch line embankment that was on the line of the M25 then under construction. The lower levels of the embankment consisted of uncompacted lumps of clay, bigger and with more voids towards the bottom, below which we found the blackened remains of the grass that had been growing in the original field, with topsoil still below it. Not surprisingly there was evidence that the top of the embankment had had to be raised with whatever was available as the fill settled and consolidated.

Victorian railway engineers had no available analytical methods for calculating slope stability, so had to work from empirical methods (basically, try it and see). Unfortunately, in some cases stability can reduce with time (even over decades) so slopes that stood when first built wouldn't necessarily remain stable in the long term.

Methods of numerical analysis of slope stability were first developed in the mid 20th century. As a result the side slopes of motorways, built from 1959 onwards, are generally flatter than those of railways, despite the more advanced construction methods and equipment available by then. Failures of those, while not unknown, are far less common than of railway side slopes.

 

[Taunton]

2. What difficulties did they encounter when building your old favourite line? And how did they solve them?

My nearest railway line is actually Crossrail.

Where do I start ......?

 

[Snow1964]

Although I have recently moved I will discuss the line where I grew up which was about 50 metres away. It was the London and South Western Railway Bournemouth cut off line (from Brockenhurst to Christchurch and along a rebuilt branch onwards to Bournemouth)

The soil near Sway was a very gooey clay and the embankment slumped, it eventually had to be stabilised with chalk and built up, but it delayed the opening until March 1888 (but all the station buildings have 1886 carved on them (it’s intended opening date). There is a book called treacle mines which was the local name for this oozing gooey clay.

Other problems were the New Forest Verderers that wouldn’t allow a Road deviation near Lymington Junction, so a huge skew arch girder bridge on brick pillars was built. Then an embankment from near Hinton Admiral to river Avon in Christchurch

Further West the original single track branch from Ringwood was rebuilt about 6 feet lower and doubled through Boscombe. The lowering was to eliminate all the level crossings whilst keeping reasonable road gradients over the new bridges. At least by 1880s the LSWR had realised that level crossings were to be avoided at all cost.

 

[61653 HTAFC]

The Clayton West branch: Supposedly the navvies digging out Shelley Woodhouse tunnel and the adjacent cutting in Skelmanthorpe were having difficulty with the geology, so locals with (largely "off the books" at the time) mining experience were drafted in to help. These locals were said to have been nicknamed "Shatterers" by the railway foremen, which is one of several etymological theories as to how the village gained the nickname of "Shat".

 

[Pigeon]

The Malvern Hills are the highest point of a ridge formed when a deep igneous intrusion forced an edge of a stratum of extremely ancient, extremely hard rock upwards through the later overlying sedimentary deposits. So if you look inside them you find a variety of steeply-dipping strata with an extremely hard and resistant core sticking up in the middle surrounded by different kinds of, basically, crud. Accordingly, when the Worcester and Hereford Railway tried to dig a hole all the way through from one side to the other, it turned out to be one of those tunnels. They were going great guns to begin with and making record rates of rapid progress with the easy digging as they went through the crud, but then they hit the core and it was a case of "oh, bollocks". Now their rates of progress were making records for how slow they were, going down to a few inches per week. I reckon that must have been an average over several weeks because you don't use blasting charges in a three-inch-deep hole, so it would have been something like a month or two drilling the holes one grain of dust at a time followed by a big bang and then they report the average rate based on how many feet of rock the blast got out divided by how many weeks it took them before they could fire it. At one point they tried some early kind of powered rock drill, IIRC powered by steam so on top of not actually being much good as a drill in any case it filled the bore with hot fog. They reckoned it wasn't worth the hassle and went back to doing it by hand. It took them ages.

As well as being ridiculously hard, the core is also highly faulted, so even though it was really difficult to make a hole through it, it was also really difficult to stop it trying to fill itself up again. The crumbly rubbish on either side caused the same kind of problem, probably less unexpectedly. So there was also yet another repeat performance of the same Ruth Falzine show that had played in countless tunnels through dodgy rock and would play in many more, including Contractor Skimping On The Lining for an encore.

So they built the railway up to the ends, but the opening was then delayed by some years while they finished digging the hole for the final bit to go through. They did also have to re-do the river bridge in Worcester because the inspector found it was too wobbly as first constructed, but I'm pretty sure they still got that done before the tunnel was completed.

It is interesting to wonder what might have happened if they had managed to open when they thought they would. That would have given the Midland's part of the ownership of the West Midlands Railway, which included the Newport, Abergavenny and Hereford, the additional backing of an actual connection to the rest of their system at an earlier date than was actually the case. There was at one point the prospect of the Midland taking it over completely, which didn't end up happening, but the line was originally supposed to open before that opportunity arose and in actuality it didn't. If it had done, the Midland would have had more of the relevant influence at the important moment, and the result might have gone the other way.

It would also have given the Midland a connection to Abergavenny before the Heads of the Valleys line started to happen. That was another of the innumerable lines that ran out of money before they had got going and had to pimp themselves round to the bigger companies in the area. It was expected that it would end up with the GWR/Midland interests, but as it happened the LNWR sneaked in the back door and pulled the rug out from under their feet. Again, had the Midland been a significant influence in the area while it was under construction, they would probably have been in with a better chance and all the Valley lines that ended up being LNWR operations could have ended up with the Midland instead. Now that would have been fun.

The tunnel continued to be a problem after it had opened. As well as being unpopular with crews due to being on a 1 in 80 gradient and having an unusually narrow bore, it kept needing repairs as the dodgy rock and dodgy lining did what dodgy rock and dodgy linings do, including actually falling in once or twice. By 1926 the GWR were fed up with it and dug a replacement to the south of the original, with a normal size bore and the gradient reduced to 1 in 90. Advances in plant made it much less of a performance than the original had been, although the geology altered enough even in the few metres between the two bores that it still gave them the odd surprise. They also built it properly so it hasn't kept falling in like the old one did.

They had some interest in the idea of keeping the old one open for the up line (which goes down) and leaving only Ledbury tunnel as the only single-track section between Worcester and Hereford, but they decided not to. This meant that in WW2 the military could use it to keep torpedoes in, with a narrow-gauge tramway to get them in and out. Later on it fell in again and now to get from one end to the other involves crawling through a pipe.

There is only one ventilation shaft because the hill rises too steeply above the tunnel to find a sensible site for any others, and that one is so close to the west end that there doesn't seem a lot of point having it at all. When they dug the new tunnel they didn't bother digging a new shaft, they just dug a gallery sideways from the new tunnel to the old shaft. There is some utterly barmy conspiracy theory that claims the shaft is in the wrong place and has right-angle bends in it for some reason which is both sinister and so silly that I have no memory whatsoever of what it's supposed to be beyond some vague notion of the government putting werewolves in it or something, but of course plain old CBA is the only explanation that's actually needed.

I have no actual idea, but I have a suspicion that there may have been some kind of problem with Worcester tunnel as well. This is a slightly silly tunnel which is only about 200m long. It would have made more sense for the railway just to go round the end of the hill like the canal does, which is only perhaps 1km further round, but in between the two transport projects they had built a load of nobby houses all along the side of the hill looking over the canal, so the railway had to tunnel through behind the back of them.

The approach to the town end of the tunnel is through a very deep and steep-sided cutting, and only about half the length of the tunnel is actually going through the hill. (They would probably just have made a cutting all the way through if there hadn't already been houses on top.) The other half of the tunnel is at the bottom of the terminal 100m of the cutting, with only a thin blanket of fill on top. This makes me suspect that they found they'd overdone it with the slope of the sides of the cutting, and had to build an extra length onto the end of the tunnel to keep the sides of the cutting off the track.