With current shows including John Constable’s late paintings and other art displays, the Royal Academy of Arts in London’s Piccadilly is an incongruous setting for a meeting with a tunnel engineer. Not much there to invoke Smeaton, Brunel or Muir Wood. Yet it is where Divik Bandopadhyaya chose as the place to be interviewed.
A recent arrival from the subcontinent who at only 27 has just finished a one-year stint as head of BTSYM – the British Tunnelling Society’s youth wing – Bandopadhyaya is clearly driving in the fast lane. It is not long before he begins to open up about his past and the choice of tunnelling as his chosen career.
“I was desperate to get out of India,” he says, having already seen much of the country thanks to his parents’ jobs as civil servants – positions prized in India as much for their prestige as for their security.
Even before leaving Delhi, Bandopadhyaya had already decided civil engineering was to be his chosen career. Thanks to a close family contact, he had been invited by Lombardi India to pop in for a couple of days to learn about drill and blast tunnelling. “One of the first things I got involved in at Lombardi was ground squeezing, but even after leaving, I was still in two minds about tunnelling,” he admits.
It was only after having arrived in London in 2012 and safely enrolled on the BEng Civil Engineering course at the University of East London (UEL) that his interest in tunnelling really started to develop.
“During my first year, I started signing up to tunnel visits because a lot of tunnelling was taking place on UEL’s doorstep. You had Limmo Peninsula on one side, the Lee Tunnel on the other, both ongoing projects which I was keen to experience. So, in 2013, I decided to find out more about tunnelling and did an internship over the summer with the tunnels team at Atkins.” It was while there that he became familiar with the BTSYM and its aims.
However, the pull of bridges would once again exert an influence. In 2014, Bandopadhyaya did another internship, this time with the bridges team at ARUP. But it was interrupted after only a month, when he found himself being driven along Martin Herrenknecht Strasse for a 10-week stint working with Dr Karin Bappler at Herrenknecht’s manufacturing facility in Schwanau, Germany. Bappler has since 2008 managed Herrenknecht’s geotechnical and consulting department for the traffic tunnelling division. The experience, says Bandopadhyaya, would turn out to be ‘brilliant’. “I think at that point I decided that tunnelling was really for me.”
To have had the opportunity to learn and work at Herrenknecht must have been a dream come true, something that not many young people get to experience, whether students or newly qualifed engineers.
Familiarisation with BTSYM would follow shortly: “I attended my first BTSYM lecture in my first year as an undergraduate as I had started turning up at ICE lectures which not only offered all this free knowledge but also free food and alcohol.”
By the third year of his BEng, the tunnelling teredo had well and truly struck and, after graduating from UEL, he embarked on the Warwick MSc Tunnelling course in autumn 2015, finishing in October the following year.
As for specific interests, it is sprayed concrete linings and timber headings that excite him the most because “these are areas prone to much more subjective interpretation than TBMs, which are more mechanical and so more predictable.”
As an employee of London Bridge Associates, Bandopadhyaya has experienced a diverse range of projects. He is currently seconded to CVB (the joint venture of Costain, Vinci Construction Grands Projects and Bachy Soletanche) working as an asset protection engineer on the eastern part of the Tideway ‘super sewer’.
“Currently, I’m the only asset protection engineer on Tideway East seconded to contractor CVB. I cover all the sites on ‘East’: that comprises five sites, all the tunnels and all the interfaces (apart from Thames Water and the DLR interface at Greenwich); also interfaces with Network Rail, Thames Water, you name it, I cover it. It is a compliance role so one day I might be reviewing RAMS for dived inspections, another day lift plans or a design report. In a way you are getting second-hand experience but you also learn a lot.
“I’ve been able to access so much knowledge with this role on Tideway – commercial as well as technical. For example, does the average young civil engineer know how a ring main unit (RMU) works?”
Prior to Tideway East, he had worked on the planning of Counters Creek Storm Relief Sewer in West London (the project was scrapped by Thames Water in 2018); then came to Tideway East, working with Ken Spiby (also of LBA) on assessing the constructability of structures.
He has also had a brief sojourn in Somerset, at Hinkley Point C, working on the secondary lining. Unfortunately, that stay lasted only 11 months. There was also a bout of sickness during which he worked, again remotely, on the Dublin Metro Link and on Transport for London (TfL) projects.
Bandopadhyaya is clearly amassing a wealth of experience for such a young age but how did he fare during the pandemic? It has not been easy. Covid struck as he began his BTSYM chairmanship and that clearly had a disruptive effect. However, despite the pandemic’s disruption, BTSYM held around nine lectures during his chairmanship and led to the BTS YouTube channel getting a very healthy 1,500 subscribers.
“I’ve been involved with BTSYM for about six years now but this past year has not really seen major achievements. Everyone was excited about doing things remotely until the second lockdown during which the morale and willingness of volunteers had dropped. People felt overwhelmed, not happy in their personal lives, a lot of people were thinking of changing jobs, many people did change jobs and departed for other companies.
“There were grand plans but I guess my greatest achievement was staying calm under lockdown. I found myself constantly firefighting in my spare time, scrambling to find the best way to deliver events on YouTube; getting people agreeing to do a lecture for BTSYM; firefighting to deliver an array of lectures – and that was all done by randomly bombarding chairpersons from other YM organisations globally such as Brazil, India and others. This had the effect of forging new, close friendships with other chairs throughout the pandemic.”
But given such a beneficial experience of ‘the ‘remote’ community, it is surprising to hear that Bandopadhyaya is ambivalent about the role of online learning for tunnellers, not sure of whether it is a good thing or a bad thing.
“The problem is that although it makes knowledge more accessible, people can get away with not showing up and not being in the bar – which is the best place to get knowledge of tunnelling. Whatever people say in a lecture tends to be the sanitised version; to establish a more realistic picture you really have to get stuck in to engage people at the bar.” Which is also a good place to get stuck in to the traditional BTS sausage and chips, although this is now on hold due to the pandemic.
Continuing the BTSYM theme, Bandopadhyaya says: “In October 2020, a few of us had a brainstorm and came up with the idea of a 24/7 e-marathon which we discussed with the ITAym steering board. On 4 December 2020 [World Tunnel Day] we did a Zoom call for 24 hours starting in Australia and ending in Chile. Throughout the course of the 24 hours, around 3,000 clicks were generated on the link. Although it was continuous, without a break, we had different session chairs, with each country sharing something about its industry.” The marathon will now be restaged in 2021 since the ITAym steering board has decided it would like to perpetuate the event.
The pandemic has brought together the young-member fraternity a lot closer than would have happened under normal conditions, when people might have gathered, say, once a year at a WTC. A further consequence, he believes, certainly from the BTSYM point of view, is that it can, whenever, wherever and at short notice, organise a lecture, giving young people globally access to knowledge even in their spare time and through their mobile phones, just one aspect of the unstoppable march of technology. Talking of which, what does he see as the recent, really significant developments in tunnelling?
“One of the key things for me is Herrenknecht’s variable density TBM. Another is Bouygues’ achievements with robotic automation on the TBM, changing cutter discs and handling segments. I think we are rapidly heading toward fully automated continuous tunnelling.”
Smarter materials and more automation are clearly the way forward. “More operations on a TBM will become automated with limited manual input. I think within the next 50-80 years, men will be outside the tunnel…but at present, thinking of station upgrades, I can’t see how you do a really complicated connection without hand mining and timbering.”
Climate change is an obvious topic to bring up with Bandopadhyaya. But he does not see it stopping projects. On the contrary, growing populations will always need infrastructure, he says.
“Industry is taking steps to reduce the carbon content of tunnel construction. It’s net zero and it’s about cradle-to-grave. And tunnels last a long time. However, we will definitely need to come up with much more innovative solutions in materials. So, I think the whole climate crisis will force us to innovate more.”
A constant challenge for the engineering sector generally is the perennial skills shortage. How can we make engineering a more attractive option? Says Bandopadhyaya: “I think we will always have a shortage of competent engineers unless you start paying astronomical sums. And anyway, has there ever been a time when you did not have a shortage of competent engineers, in this or any other country? These days I am more concerned about retention of personnel”
The way tunnels are procured could be improved, thinks Bandopadhyaya. “It’s about time we started considering the costs of tunnelling rather than the price. I believe the market can improve that.”
He is a big fan of PFI but at the same time thinks governments should give better returns to the market if the market is to put money into public sector projects. Frameworks would be more beneficial.
“I hear that PFI does not work because the market is not incentivised to give the money. Basically, I think more DBFOs and more PFI would be a better approach and also less focused on the price.
“We also need to look at early contractor involvement (ECI) which tends to work very well. The dream is an alliance model but it works well on smaller projects and I’d like to see it on larger projects. CTRL did a bit of that and it worked well. So, more alliancing, more frameworks, more emphasis on ECI, and incentivise the market more.”
As the pandemic waxes and wanes, newly-qualified engineers enter the industry at a difficult time. What challenges do they have to face?
“Covid has changed things. For people in design, I see the challenge coming from not working as a team five days a week, so getting second-hand experience is more difficult. If I look at my past years in the industry, I would not have been able to solve many issues at work had I not interacted with others at work or at the BTS bar where I got that second-hand experience: those very valuable anecdotes relate to the work you are doing and really make a difference to the next decision you are going to take.
“Our industry is very small and for me as a tunneller it is based on long- lasting friendships with others in the industry. You learn through them and they learn through you. But post pandemic, these have become a lot more difficult to initiate. The challenge is to not be worried about making friends.”
So, what advice would he give to newly-qualified tunnel engineers? He stipulates:
? ”Don’t be afraid to make friends, young and old.
? Get involved with committees as it helps you make more friends.
? Don’t be afraid to approach older, wiser engineers as that is where you will learn.
? Show up at industry events, and at the BTS bar (you can learn a lot over a pint and sausage and chips).
? Do the Warwick MSc.
? Attend BTS and BTSYM events and
? Have a vision for your tunnel, and don’t get blinded by tunnel vision – but you might have to grab me in the BTS bar so I can explain what I mean by this”.
And with such sound advice, what else would new tunnel recruits need to prepare them for the road ahead?
