CLAUDIO CABRAL DIAS | INTERVIEW


ost of these interviews in T&TI have been with major figures in tunnelling who have long and successful careers


- which mean that they tend towards to upper end of the age spectrum. Claudio Cabral Dias won the ITA Young


Tunneller of the Year award in 2023. He was 35. He was worked internationally and in the UK on, among many other projects, Crossrail, HS2 and Hinkley Point C. In other words, he has achieved a lot already, and still has a full career ahead of him. The future of tunnelling lies with him and those like him. He is Portuguese. “I was born in a small


village in the mountains,” he says. “There are no tunnels there, only mountains; so it was quite late, at university actually, when I was studying civil engineering in Porto that I got more interested in this field. My father is a builder: I used to go during the summer and work with him building houses, so I was interested in construction overall but not necessarily in tunnels. “In the first years of university, actually,


I was not so sure I had chosen the right path for me because it was quite abstract: there was lots of maths and physics but nothing that was actually changing the environment, no physical building of things that communities will use.” What changed? And why then, in the end,


tunnels? “It was because I had a very good


professor for soil mechanics. Manuel Matos Fernandes is more than just good, he is one of those professors who are passionate about their subject. When he talked about geotechnics it was really interesting,’ he says. “Porto itself is amazing. It is a place where geology has deeply shaped it.” For those who do not know the city, it lies on the steep valley carved out by the River Douro and spanned by spectacular and remarkably-engineered bridges, most notably one by Gustave Eiffel. “We have granite, very hard, and then


you have also the residual soils. Professor Fernandes talked about complexity of working with ground: it is not a man-made material so there is all the variability that comes with that. You study the ground, you choose what you want to do with it; so that part of the course was somewhere between engineering and art. It is much more than just numbers. It is actually something that you have to put your mind to.


“When you dig a hole it is not certain


what you will find; until you dig it you don’t know what is at the other end. With tunnels, towards the end you are reducing that uncertainty but at the beginning it is quite high. Before choosing engineering, I had thought of studying history and actually there are some links: by looking at the past you will be able to understand better the present or the future. I see a bit of that in tunnelling. The more you study either subject the more you then understand and also the more questions get raised as well. “I spent my last year specialising in


geotechnics then went to Barcelona to do my master’s thesis. It was in the application of numerical analysis to shafts. The timing of that was good: this was 2011, not so long ago, but at that time numerical analysis was a growing market and there were plenty of new developments to be made in it, especially in the 3D field. We were not really developing the software - commercial softwares were already available - but what we were developing was more creative ways of using it, more efficient methods as modellers. “After Barcelona I applied for jobs in


Portugal but the 2008 financial crisis was still having its effects so that was difficult. I decided to try abroad and got a job in São Paulo, in Brazil. It was with a small consultancy company that, luckily for me, specialised in tunnels. “And, being small, it took on smaller parts of designs but for many different


…STARTING IN A SMALL


VILLAGE YOU END UP IN A WONDERFUL BUILDING DESIGNING RAIL LINES WITH PEOPLE FROM ALL ROUND THE WORLD


projects. So I started on Line 6 of the São Paulo metro, then worked on Line 4 of the Rio de Janeiro metro, and then on the Brasilia metro expansion; there were five or six projects in three years. “That gave me contact with different


parts of design and construction, and I was able to travel a bit. It was exciting, too, because I started to understand better the scale of the works. When you are designing things you have the plans in your laptop, and they don’t look so big but then you go into a shaft or into a station and then it’s enormous. You think ‘Wow! I hope my calculations are right, these are massive holes...’ “It is always good to go to the


construction site because only that way can you see the reality. Sometimes it is difficult because as designers we design the project and then a contractor will come and build it and you are not there. You don’t actually see it because you have done your design two or three years before and if there is something in your design that you could have changed to make their job easier you normally don’t find it out.


Above: Claudio Cabral Dias presenting at WTC 2023 September 2024 | 43


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