INTERVIEW | ALASTAIR BIGGART
machines, of 5.15m and 6.1m diameters,
and compressed air equipment for shaft sinking. I was resident in Cairo for a year and a half, as Technical Director. “Control of groundwater was essential on
that project and we used ground treatment and compressed air a lot. I had worked with compressed air before, during my time at Mitchell Brothers. The Medical Research Council were updating the decompression tables and came up with what became known as the Blackpool Tables. Mitchells had an agreement with them to study the use of compressed air on an outfall tunnel in Blackpool; I had been the director in charge of the project. “By an unfortunate irony, in Cairo I
experienced the bends myself. I got it in both knees. It was very unpleasant and very painful, but you just go back to the site, into the medical decompression chamber, where they put the pressure just a wee touch above what you were working at. The pain completely disappears and they then lower that pressure down overnight while you sleep. I have had one new knee since then, but whether it was due to that or not I have no idea. Happily the new one works very well. “It was while I was with Lilley’s in Egypt
that the Channel Tunnel got under way. I thought I really ought to get on to it, so I wrote to a friend who happened to know Peter Costain (Costains, of course, were part of the TransManche Link (TML) consortium) and I asked him to send my CV to him. He did, and I was accepted. I was the assistant construction director looking after the tunnelling and the casting of the segments for the tunnel lining, which was a major operation. We cast 2.5 million tonnes of segments.” The Channel Tunnel was the iconic
project in the industry, then and now. Talk to any tunneller who was involved and they will tell you that there were things on it that went right and things that went wrong. The biggest thing at a later stage was the logistics. “On any big project you must get the
logistics right. There’s absolutely no question about it. And they did get it right on the Channel Tunnel. I don’t take responsibility for that - I joined when they had largely sorted out the method of approach. “We had one adit that was five tracks
From top to bottom: Alastair Biggart hails from a family of engineers who worked on tunnels and also bridges in UK, Asia and Egypt
42 | February 2025
wide, sloping, with a rack and pinion railway; that took all the materials down. We had another sloping adit which brought all the muck out on a major conveyor that
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