SHORT: A Speedy Tunnel
There are up to 600 disused railway tunnels dotted around the British countryside. Some of these find new life as pedestrian tunnels or storage facilities. This week we are...
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Welcome to the Tunnelling Podcast
The Official Podcast of the British Tunnelling Society
Every day, beneath our feet, teams of men and women dedicate their lives to unearthing the underground space. As growing populations and urbanisation mount pressure on the already strained infrastructure of our cities, these men and women work round the clock to relieve the surface from our roads, rail, waterways and more. Tunnelling is still a young industry, with tunnellers carving our future landscape as they expand our use of underground space.
In this podcast, brought to you by the team behind the Engineering Matters podcast, and in partnership with the British Tunnelling Society, we go to the cutting edge of tunnelling, we see how digital technologies are making a young industry safer and helping bring projects to life that were previously thought impossible or unaffordable.
We explore advances in tunnelling technology, improvements in safety, we hear from leading experts, and industry disrupters. We share lessons from failures and celebrate successes. We tell the story of how far this industry has come and where these tunnellers are taking us next.
We do all this in The Tunnelling Podcast.
The views and opinions expressed by participants are not necessarily the views of the BTS or its members.
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S5/E3 Swissloop Tunnelling: Meeting the Challenge
Frustrated with the costs of tunnelling and Hyperloop’s resulting lack of viability, Elon Musk threw down the gauntlet to the tunnelling industry and asked if it could innovate to...
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SHORT: The tunnel that time forgot
This week’s episode looks at the long-term expansion plans for the Second Avenue Subway in New York City, as it moves to the final planning phase. The project was...
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SHORT: Sealing the Fehmarnbelt Tunnel
For The Tunnelling Podcast’s first “spotlight” episode on waterproofing, we’re looking at the tunnel seals supplied by Trelleborg’s marine and infrastructure operation for the Fehmarnbelt tunnel, the world’s longest...
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SHORT: The missing TBM
Whatever happened to the Whittaker TBM once deployed in Folkstone Warren, in Kent? This week we look at the intriguing history of this 100 year old machine… Guest Dr...
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S5/E2 Hyper Tunnel unleashes the Bots
A few years ago, two men met to discuss an idea they’d had for a tidal energy project. The idea called for an array of tunnels, rather than the...
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SHORT: The Tunnel Turning on Texas’ Taps
In this week’s tunnelling episode we look at the challenges Texas faces to its water supply and how the recently awarded Section 19 Long Tunnel Crossing, a critical part...
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SHORT: CCL6: Singapore Closes the Loop
Singapore’s Land Transport Authority has reached the half-way mark for completing its Circle Line Stage 6, which closes the Circle Line loop by connecting HarbourFront to Marina Bay stations....
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SHORT: A Tunnel for Two States
This week we are taking you to Virginia and looking at The Big Walker and East River Mountain Tunnels, which burrow through the Appalachian Mountains and cross the border...
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S5/E1 Onkalo: The Forever Store
If the Ancient Egyptians had made use of nuclear fuel, their engineers would have needed to find a solution to store the waste not just to today, but far...
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S4/E6 The Opportunity in Ventilation
A career spent in the evolving field of ventilation has yielded a number of insights to Mosen’s Fathi Tarada. In this episode we tell the story of how the...
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S4/E5 HS2 and the Golden Thread of Station Design
High Speed 2 is the UK’s latest transport megaproject. Billed as the largest ever investment in the country’s rail, its first phase will link London in the south via...
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S4/E4 The Drammen Spiral
Faced with a need to free surface space for their expanding town, and a reliance on the local quarry for foundation material, the people the town of Drammen in...
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S4/E3 Propping up Vienna
Vienna, the capital city of Austria is also known worldwide as The City of Music and this musical metropolis is fine tuning the way that it constructs underground. In...
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S4/E2 Cross River Rail: Under the Brisbane River
Brisbane has an Achilles heel. But luckily, it is one that engineers are on the verge of correcting. As the capital of Queensland, a resource-rich state in Australia’s northeast,...
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S4/E1 Yannis Vazaios: Walking the Path
In this episode we join Yannis Vazaios on site in North Acton, London. Yannis is a Geotechnical Engineer working on High Speed 2’s Victoria Road site as the designer’s...
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S3/E6 Disaster Resilient Infrastructure
The San Fernando Earthquake of 9 February 1971 caught experts completely off-guard. The event galvanised a generation of engineers, and improvements are still being made today that can be...
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S3/E5 Hagerbach: The Superhero Story
Every good superhero universe has its origins story. Hagerbach’s begins with Rudolf Amberg, looking to innovate and find new efficiency savings for his iron mine. So began a 50-year...
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S3/E4 Mechanisation in Shaft Sinking
Mechanisation is the most reliable way to ensure the safety of workers in any construction underground. In this episode we look at the growth in mechanised methodologies for shaft-sinking...
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S3/E3 Megaprojects (Part 3): Learning from Experience
This is the third and final episode of our three-part special looking at the delivery of megaprojects. In this episode we examine the lessons learned from two of the...
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S3/E3 Megaprojects (Part 2): How to Deliver?
Our sister podcast Engineering Matters produced this three-part special looking at the delivery of megaprojects to mark its 100th episode. In this second episode, we look at how a...
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Through the Brenner Pass
To look at a map of Europe is to see a disconnected landmass. Sometimes described as a ‘peninsula of peninsulas’, the world’s second smallest continent is naturally divided. Even...
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