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01 December 2013

A Guide To Construction Equipment For Projects

By Victor Kavlotsky


If you were building a freeway, you would use different equipment from what you would use to build an airport. Building houses on the Atlantic coast of the United States, which is battered by regular hurricanes, requires a different approach from building residences in California, which is vulnerable to earthquakes. You would use still different types of construction equipment for projects in Oklahoma, in the middle of Tornado Alley.

One of the biggest civil engineering projects ever undertaken, the Channel Tunnel in Europe, was opened in 1994. It connects Calais in France with Dover in southeast England. It took five years to construct and required a work force of 13,000. The combined mass of the 11 machines used to bore through the rock under the sea amounted to 12,000 tonnes. This is more than the weight of the Eiffel Tower in Paris.

The tonnage of assorted mud and rocks that were excavated from beneath the channel was transported to a location near the town of Dover. This area is now called Samphire Hoe, after a green vegetable that has become something of a delicacy in southeast England. As a result, the English land mass grew by ninety acres, an area 25 percent the size of Regents Park, one of London's major park areas. The tunnel is 31 miles in length; of this, 24 miles are under water.

The eleven boring machines dug a tunnel length of 250 feet per day, the equivalent of two football fields. The entire volume of spoil removed from the seabed would be enough to fill 13 Wembley Stadiums. Some organizations consider the Channel Tunnel to be one of the seven wonders of the modern world. There are actually three separate tunnels, two to carry trains each way under the sea and a third tunnel dedicated to service and repairs.

The shuttle trains used to carry passengers and cars across the channel are each 775 meters in length, or roughly eight football fields. If every car that has passed through the tunnel since it opened in 1994 were parked one after the other and placed vertically, they would reach the Moon, a distance of approximately 250,000 miles.

At least 280,000,000 people have been transported under the sea between England and France since the tunnel opened in 1994. This is four times the British population of 70,000,000 men, women and children.

One of the 580-tonne drill that were used to dig the tunnel was auctioned on eBay in 2004. It sold for more than sixty thousand bucks. The main construction equipment for projects used to construct the Channel Tunnel were 11 giant tunnel boring machines.




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