July 1969 may have been the hey day for flower power, but for the tunnelling industry surely the big news was the publication of the second ever issue of the then six-times-a-year Tunnels & Tunnelling journal!
Edited by David Light, the 5 shillings July/August offering contained a seemingly modest 34 pages of editorial. Not a lot when compared to today’s regular 35 – 40+ pages every month, but thoroughly respectable considering it was very much a one man show in a world without email or internet!
Possibly reflecting the lack of global communications available was the news section that ran to three pages, generally concerning UK projects. The opening news story though focused on the upcoming OECD Tunnel Conference in Washington DC to be held in June 1970. Little did they know at the time that this was to be the birthplace of the International Tunnelling Association!
Also, high on the agenda was London Transport’s renewed appeal to the UK Ministry of Transport to authorise a £14M extension to London Underground’s Piccadilly Line from Hounslow West to Heathrow Airport. What a coincidence then, that 35 years later, to the month, T&TI features yet another extension of the very same line from Heathrow onto the new Terminal 5!
The much talked about, and yet to be built, Channel Tunnel was back in the news with the UK’s Minister for Transport attempting to allay public fears that the tunnel would saturate London with traffic from the continent. The Minister stated, “most of the traffic using the tunnel would want to get to, and from, the Continent whether the tunnel is built or not. What the tunnel would bring about is redistribution of traffic flows… its effects would be relatively slight.”
He concluded by stating that all Ministry studies so far had shown that the tunnel would be the cheapest and most reliable means of crossing the Channel.
Site related articles covered the construction of the John F Kennedy Tunnel under the Schelde in Antwerp, the Coo Ponts H-E scheme in Belgium, and the renovation of the UK’s Blackwall Tunnel. A selective international bibliography was made available for those intrigued by all tunnels immersed, a short article on mass urban transportation sang the praises of the underground option, whilst aspects of rail tunnel maintenance were dealt with in detail in the issue’s closing article.
More technical issues were addressed in an article on ‘Stresses on circular sections underground’ (a festival of complex equations), a piece on precision surveying, and our personal favourite, ‘Mechanised drifting by the full face method (Part 1)’, which in its opening salvo philosophically posed the question, ‘Fullface boring: a thing of fashion or a really economical excavation method? Opinions vary, but even the greatest sceptics admit today that the method is here to stay.’
