BOB IBELL | INTERVIEW
took these segments down to a shielded Dosco machine that had a had a very simple gullwing erector. It wasn’t a new system, but we made some tweaks to it and we broke records.” He was really getting into tunnelling by
this time and was about to get into it in the biggest way possible. “Towards the end of that project, at the tail-end of 1984, I was just settling down for Christmas and I got a phone call: it was Ross McKenzie, who was Director in Charge of Tunnelling at Taylor Woodrow – ‘Can you be here on Saturday?’ he said. ‘We think the Channel Tunnel is on, our Chairman Frank Gibb is very supportive and I want you to get involved in it.’ So, the following week I was privileged to be sitting down, around a table with others and the famous ‘Gang of Four’ who were driving the revival of the project and we got started on it. “The five companies that comprised
the Channel Tunnel Group (CTG) and their advisors had judged it to be financeable, and the minute it was financeable then it meant that it was on. They had convinced Margaret Thatcher that it could be done. She wanted it to be a road tunnel; but as engineers in fact we knew from the outset that the only one that would really be viable was rail, particularly because of ventilation. We were anticipating that vehicle emissions would improve, but in 1984 they were not there yet.” The project went out for competition
with CTG as, by then, a UK-French company. “There were two other groups: one was proposing an island in the middle, one a bridge. I was in the CTG team responsible for putting together the tunnelling side of the submission, being supported by the TW tunnelling division. There wasn’t really much of a design at that stage; Mott, Hay and Anderson (MHA) were on board and they were defining the basic shape but that wasn’t the question. It was instead convincing the financing people that it could be built: that we could deal with things like how we would do it, how would we be sure to meet in the middle, what was the split between Brits and the French, what our basic logistics plan was, how long were going to take to build, how efficient would it be? It was very much: ‘Is construction feasible?’ “So we looked at things like, ‘We’re going
to need piston ducts to take out the air resistance to the trains travelling at high speeds, we’re going to need cooling, we are going to need drainage and power
Top: Large diameter SGI lining on London Bridge Station
Centre: Temporary deck panels over Borough High Street laid in weekend possessions Above: Bob thinking about retirement on the banks of the River Tweed
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