Underground Construction history

1“First recorded in 1820-30; sub- + way1” .

The first use of the shield, by Brunel and his son Isambard, was in 1825 on the Wapping-Rotherhithe Tunnel through clay under the Thames River.

The Greathead shield was actually inspired by the Brunel shield, which was developed by the French genius Marc Isambard Brunel to dig the Thames Tunnel back in 1826, the first underwater tunnel (a walkway tunnel) in the world.

Ever since the opening of the first passenger rail service powered by steam locomotives between Liverpool and Manchester in 1830, there had been a wave of railway constructions heading into London.

Built in 1831–33, it was a combination of canal and railroad systems, carrying canal barges over a summit.

The first passenger-carrying railway (above the ground) in London was the London and Greenwich Line, which opened on February 8, 1836, and continued expansion for the next four years.

Mt. prospect tunnel, built 1837 (NY & HR RR) .

A 3.5-mile tunnel (the Woodhead) of the Manchester-Sheffield Railroad (1839–45) was driven from five shafts up to 600 feet deep.

By 1840, the line carried nearly six million passengers and had enlarged its main service lines to the outskirts of London's central business district.

After several floodings from hitting sand pockets and a seven-year shutdown for refinancing and building a second shield, the Brunels succeeded in completing the world’s first true subaqueous tunnel in 1841, essentially nine years’ work for a 1,200-foot-long tunnel.

In fact, according to a circa 1842 scale drawing, the arch of the Croton Aqueduct is in fact 2 layers of brick thick, and adding 0.5" for a single cement mortar joint, making the crown of the Croton Aqueduct a total of 7.5" thick.

It was built by an engineer called Sir Marc Brunel and his son Isambard to allow cargo to be transported underneath the busy river Thames. It was opened on 9 January 1843.

Using Figure 20 lets now apply Rankine’s formulas to the Atlantic Avenue tunnel of 1844.

In 1852, the City Terminus Company was formed, and the proposal was again placed in front of Parliament.

These were the types of promises Parliament was looking for, and the line was approved in 1853 under a new title the North Metropolitan Railway.

But a turning point in prevention came in 1854, when a London physician, Doctor John Snow, established the connection between contaminated water and cholera.

The deviation was 200 meters away from a straight line connecting the ends of the tunnel in the heart of the mountain! Around 7000 cubic meter rock were removed from the mountain. [Based upon] the text of Herodotus, Guerin (1856) uncovered the entrance of the aqueduct.”

The first of these, the Mont Cenis Tunnel (also known as Fréjus), required 14 years (1857–71) to complete its 8.5-mile length.

Construction of the underground railway began in October, 1859.

Railway Intelligence, by Mihill Slaughter (1860) , gives us a detailed, firsthand account, as to the origins and purposes, of the first of the London Underground lines:

The press decided it would never work, but a sceptical public soon warmed to the idea of descending below ground to ride a train, and within weeks of opening in January 1863 the Metropolitan Railway was carrying thousands of people every day.

On 7 January 1869, the first steam train travelled through the Thames Tunnel.

Colorado School of Mines, established in 1874, has been named the top mineral and mining engineering school in the world in the QS World University Rankings for four years running.

When the state of Massachusetts finally took over the project, it completed it in 1876 at five times the originally estimated cost.

Compressed air alone was used to hold back the water in 1880 in a first attempt to tunnel under New York’s Hudson River; major difficulties and the loss of 20 lives forced abandonment after only 1,600 feet had been excavated.

However, this all changed in 1881, when Werner von Siemens built the first electric tram line in Berlin.

The next major innovation in subway construction was: The “deep tubes” built for the London Underground, circa 1886, using the Greathead Shield (a very early form of a tunnel boring machine).

In 1887, Henry Whitney, the king of Boston streetcars (again, horse-drawn trams on rails), and owner of vast land in Brookline, already aware of Sprague’s experiments, first proposed to build an electric subway in downtown Boston.

Later in 1888, America also welcomed its first electric tram service, in hilly Richmond.

The longitudinal section of the Cloaca segment (up to the Forum Augustum) that was discovered in 1889.

On 18 December 1890, the world's first electric railway deep underground was opened.

Construction began in March, 1895, using the cut-and-cover method as the Metropolitan in London.

Furthermore, tragedy had to be endured, when construction of the subway caused a leak in a gas pipe underground at the corner of Tremont and Boylston, resulting in an explosion that killed 10 passersby on March 4, 1897.

17Brooklyn did not become part of NYC until 1898-a half-century after the Atlantic Avenue Tunnel was built.

1908 was an important year for development of the network.

One of the most notorious was the first Japanese Tanna Tunnel, driven through the Takiji Peak in the 1920s.

Murray Hill tunnel, Manhattan, New York city (1923) .

A new problem, noxious gases from internal-combustion engines, was successfully solved by Clifford Holland for the world’s first vehicular tunnel, completed in 1927 under the Hudson River and now bearing his name.

By employing small drifts (horizontal passageways), braced to a central core, liner-plate technique has been successful in larger tunnels—Figure 4 shows 1940 practice on the 20-foot tunnels of the Chicago subway.

Since 1950, however, most subaqueous tunnelers preferred the immersed-tube method, in which long tube sections are prefabricated, towed to the site, sunk in a previously dredged trench, connected to sections already in place, and then covered with backfill.

Following initial success as rock-tunnel support in 1951–55 on the Maggia Hydro Project in Switzerland, the technique was further developed in Austria and Sweden.

Sporadic attempts to realize the tunnel engineer’s dream of a mechanical rotary excavator culminated in 1954 at Oahe Dam on the Missouri River near Pierre, in South Dakota.

On the 7.2-mile Mont Blanc Vehicular Tunnel of 32-foot size under the Alps in 1959–63, a pilot bore ahead helped greatly to reduce rock bursts by relieving the high geostress.

Since about 1960, rock bolts have had major success in providing the sole support for large tunnels and rock chambers with spans up to 100 feet.

In contrast, a progressive rockfall on the 14-mile Kemano penstock tunnel in Canada resulted in shutting down the whole town of Kitimat in British Columbia, and vacationing workers for nine months in 1961 since there were no other electric sources to operate the smelter.

In 1962 a comparable breakthrough for the more difficult excavation of vertical shafts was achieved in the American development of the mechanical raise borer, profiting from earlier trials in Germany.

In 1963 this project experienced disaster when a giant landslide filled the reservoir, causing a huge wave to overtop the dam, with large loss of life.

There, in 1967, a mole had begun to progress well in hard shale, until 1,000 feet from the portal it hit a buried valley filled with water-bearing sand and gravel, which buried the mole.

As a 1968 example, Libby Dam’s Flathead Tunnel in Montana attained a concreting rate of 300 feet (90 metres) per day by using the advancing slope method.

In 1969 a first major attempt used air pressure on the face of a mole operating in sands and silts for the Paris Metro.

A 1970 attempt in volcanic clays of Mexico City used a clay-water mixture as a pressurized slurry (liquid mixture); the technique was novel in that the slurry muck was removed by pipeline, a procedure simultaneously also used in Japan with a 23-foot-diameter pressure-on-face mole.

The concept has been further developed in England, where an experimental mole of this type was first constructed in 1971.

In 2007, the world's oldest underground railway network marked the first year that one billion passengers used it within just one year.

40 among graduate programs in the country according to United States News & World Report), means the university was particularly well suited to launch the first and only underground construction and tunnel engineering graduate program in North America in 2012.