Category Archives: engineering

city, engineering, Europe, travel

What have the Romans ever done for us?

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The aqueduct.

With my sling off, physio started and a few days left to use up my annual leave allowance before the end of the leave year, it was a great opportunity to finally get to Rome – it’s been top of my list for some time.

Didn’t see a whole heap Thursday night after the plane & train in to the city centre – just enough to find my hotel & a late bowl of pasta. First priority, after breakfast of course, was to get out & see that Rome icon, the Colisseum. Like many cities around this part of the world, it’s really easy to walk between all the main attractions & Rome is no different. I got through the gates early enough that it wasn’t too busy & I could gaze at the vastness & wonder at all the ancient engineering in relative peace.

Right next door is the Forum, which was the centre of Roman public life – there are all sorts of ruins of temples, palaces & such like. By now it was getting busy and also proper hot – well hot compared to what I’ve been used to. With the sun streaming down & temperatures touching 30ºC, I was starting to swelter overdressed in jeans. But it was time to walk a bit to try & find some lunch out of the touristy area.

So over the Tiber I went & wandered aimlessly through narrow streets before popping in to a small store. While contemplating all the cheeses & cold meats on display I noticed a small sign over a staircase pointing to a cafeteria up the stairs.  Lo & behold there was a small cafe up there with a large rooftop courtyard – excellent.

More walking & I was back near the Forum checking out the museums & statues around Capitolini, before heading up a huge staircase & around Foro di Triani.

Typical dinner while I’m out exploring cities is to get on the Metro & head out of the city centre & get off at any stop that I feel like & wander around aimlessly until I find a restaurant that looks likely.  This served me well as I had some great meals in little restaurants surrounded by crowds of loud & excited Italians. While I remember, there were very few British accents around, most of the native English speakers I heard were Americans & a few Australians.

Heading in to the Metro stop just around the corner from my hotel – Repubblica

After the heat of Friday & all that walking, I was proper exhausted so started a little more slowly on Saturday with a wander down to Trevi Fountain – which is well impressive, but not very fountainy. Rather some elaborate waterfalls.

Not a great picture, but it’s one of the few I have of me in Rome – so you’ll have to tolerate it

Not far from Trevi is the Pantheon, which quickly became my favourite sight in Rome.  It started life nearly 2000 years ago as a Roman temple, before eventually being taken over by the Church. With large Corinthian columns out front it starts out pretty impressively, but then you wander in & see the huge dome that is both 43 metres across & high. It’s astoundingly large considering how old it is – it’s still the largest dome ever built with unreinforced concrete.  Then you see the big hole in the top & the engineering becomes more incredible – the geometric pattern on the ceiling was neat too as the sun slowly moved around as it shone through the oculus.

More wandering to find food got me fed, into a castle (Castel Sant Angelo) with good views, popping in to Vatican City & then over the river again up a decent hill into a big park with more views back over the city – before realising my legs were about to fall off again, so a bus home to rest before dinner was a good idea.  That evening I was well off the beaten track until I crossed the Tiber again & found that bridge with all the padlocks on some of the railings – there were thousands & some of the metalwork (more likely the welds) had failed.

Sunday morning I avoided free day at the Vatican museums due to crowds & took a long bus ride south to visit the catacombs.  Dad’s got much better photos from forty years ago as he was allowed to take photos & there will still many bones down there. Still, it was interesting wandering a small length of the miles of tunnels where various tombs have been sitting for centuries.

For some reason, mostly just curiosity as to what other parts of the city look like, I thought it was a good idea to walk all the back in to town.  I came across a fascinating grocery store, a huge park, some sort of fun run (an oxymoron if there ever was one) & what I thought was ruins of a huge old castle. Intrigued I went in, and found out this massive complex was once baths. Incredible that they bothered to have 9000 men building these over six years.

More wanderings took me to the Spanish Steps (not far from hotel), which were alive with colour & people.

Monday was Vatican day, I spent most of the day in the smallest country in the world.  With May 1 (the following day) being a public holiday, the queues were very long – but worth it.  A completely insane collection of art – this is just part of the similarly decorated hundreds of metres to walk through just to get in to the Sistine Chapel.  Which of course is something else besides, but no photos again.

More hours spent queuing to get in to St Peter’s Basilica & somehow I ended up queuing to go up the dome as well. It was sometime before I realised this, so I figured I may as well pay my five euros and climb the 551 stairs to the top.  That was well worth it as first you got to the bottom of the dome inside & could look down at the people below & marvel at the intricacies of the dome paintings & mosaics.

With the ascent of a much tighter spiral staircase the steady stream of people led me in between the two layers of the dome as we gradually bent our necks further & further to keep from bruising our heads. The views all around were well worth the climb.

Yes, the camera is horizontal – it is a dome after all

Down to St Peter’s Square & beyond to the Tiber

Looking up to the dome

I still had time to return at various times to Piazza Navona, the Pantheon & Trevi Fountain around packing up, enjoying more of the local cuisine & getting to the airport. Only downside to the long weekend was the three and a half hour delay to my flight home – I’ve been a little slow at work since then, but a three day week isn’t too hard to survive tired.

Some more of the photos I took are here.

around home, engineering, history, national park, UK

New Forest tiki-tour

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The forecast for the weekend’s weather was all around pretty pants, so with a new book arriving on my Kindle I read that for a while & then it started to clear. If I had have known it was going to such a stunning day, I would have gone for a ride. Alas, I headed in to Lyndhurst eventually to wander around at leisure – having only ridden my bike through multiple times previously.

Last week, I finished a rather long historical novel centred on the New Forest for the last millenium – so my historical interest was piqued. The New Forest museum was well worth an hour to add a little bit to my appreciation of the past of the area. It was pretty pleasant wandering around the small town in the sun & it wasn’t as busy as it gets in summer. About the only thing I’ve noticed on previous rides through, is that there is a disproportionately large Ferrari & Maserati dealership at the bottom of the main street – I still can’t really figure that out, it’s not really central & while there is a bit of money around the Forest, I didn’t think it was that much. Still, the cars were nice to look at for a few minutes.

After an exquisite salmon lunch, I was off up tiny little lanes north, through Minstead & across the busy A31 to go & see the Rufus Stone. It’s supposed to commemorate the spot where William II was killed by an, apparently, stray arrow while hunting in 1100. However, it is now thought that he felled close to the coast down near Beaulieu.

More windy little lanes took me away from the main roads & I continued past home to Calshot – which sits only a few miles from where I live on a spit at the west of the entrance to Southampton Water.

Over to the Isle of Wight, ignore the gravelly beach

Those curious things – I’m still intrigued that you have to shelter from the weather so much, that it’s worth building a hut at the beach

Across the bay, Fawley Power Station on the left, Fawley Refinery centre background – not that I expect anyone else finds that noteworthy

On the spit, there’s another castle that Henry VIII built in his chain of coastal defences.  This one is a little smaller than Hurst Castle, where I went not so long ago.  The area was perfect for setting up a Naval Air Station just before WWI for sea boats.  There are still a couple of the hangars, Sopwith & Sunderland (which is now home to a dry-ski slope, climbing wall, velodrome & other such indoor sports facilities).  My enjoyable wanderings continued as there was little traffic on the rather circuitous route I took home.  A nice day to be out before the summer rush arrives.

Not wanting to spend the entire rainy Sunday inside reading another good Ian Rankin, I popped out to have a look around the couple of villages further up the west side of Southampton Water – mostly because I had the time to finally check out the Eling Tide Mill, which I’d been seeing signs for since I moved in.  In Marchwood there’s a big military port (where the Mulberry harbours were made), a big waste incinerator & a shiny new CCGT (combined cycle gas turbine power station).

But really I wanted to see the restored tidal mill – only one of two still operating in the country. It’s not overly big, but then there wasn’t much need for it to be big when a mill was first built here to harness the tides a thousand years ago.  The incoming tide floods the mill pond & when the outgoing tide is low enough the undershot Poncelot wheel starts to turn the various gears and eventually the millstone.  Only one of the two systems is restored – this is good because the working one is guarded, but you can still see all the details on the stationary one. With all the old gears, control systems (I use the term loosely), transport mechanisms, hoppers & so on I was well pleased to see the flour being made as it has been for centuries. I’ll stop boring everyone but Dr Hodge/Beavis now.

around home, engineering, history, London, UK

Crossness Pumping Station

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One of the few places in London that I really wanted to go to the last time I was here & didn’t get the opportunity to was the Crossness Beam Engines. As this great example of Victorian engineering is still undergoing extensive restoration work, there are very few days this year that one can go & visit & see an engine in operation. But today, as part of Open London (an annual weekend when a lot of London’s great architecture that is usually off limits to the public is opened up) the complex was open & welcoming visitors. What a lot of visitors there were – we queued patiently for about an hour just to get in. Who would have thought so many people would turn up to the site on the side of a huge sewage works in south-east London?

A brief history lesson – in the early half of the nineteenth century, rapidly expanding & industrialising London did not have a central sewage system & almost all waste from over 200000 cesspits was discharged into the Thames (“dump her in the Thames?”) system. Unfortunately, the Thames at high tide (it really is surprising just how far the tide flows up the river – well out west) had a habit of returning that sewage to where it came from. Even worse, the Thames was still the main supply of water to the city! Outbreaks of cholera & typhoid were, in hindsight, hardly surprising. Eventually, mid-century, a plan was devised & put in to action to deal with the problem. Basically, a two sewerage systems independent of each other were built on either side of the river. These used gravity to move all of the sewerage to the east of the city, where it was then discharged to the Thames. In the last four years of the 1850s, over eighty miles of brick intercepting sewers were built (using 318 million bricks!) & this is also the reason we have the Victoria & Albert Embankments today.

But the problem of preventing the sewage coming back into the city on the tide still had to be overcome. This is where the pumping stations came in – one at Crossness (south) & the other at Abbey Mills (north) were used to pump the sewage up to large reservoirs. From the reservoirs, the sewage was released on the outgoing tide. There was no treatment initially, later settling ponds were introduced & the solids were shipped out to sea & dumped there. The pumping station at Crossness had twelve boilers powering four large rotative beam engines. Each engine had two pumps attached to the beam & at peak they could move over 500 tonnes of sewage a minute. That was after a retrofit, changing the engines from single-cylinder to triple-expansion (high, intermediate & low pressure cylinders). The engines were superseded by diesel & eventually left to decay & vandalism for thirty years from the mid 1950s. I’m sure the restorers are also stoked that someone had the foresight to fill the engine area up with sand to prevent methane accumulating – they’ve had to remove a hundred tonnes just to restore the first engine.

Being built by the Victorians, the building & fittings are fantastic. But the real star is the fully restored Prince Consort engine operating under steam. The flywheel is almost nine metres in diameter & has a mass of over fifty tonnes. The beam is almost fourteen metres long & forty-seven tonnes heavy. It was surprisingly quiet as all the valves opened & closed in time to drive that massive beam up & down. It was well worth the wait to get in as one could wander around at leisure poking around not only the restored Prince Consort, but Victoria (which they are starting to restore now) & the still derelict Albert Edward & Alexandra engines. All the volunteers were friendly, knowledge & some were in period dress which added to the old time feel of the place. It was a great few hours out & I particularly enjoyed marvelling at the feat of engineering from 150 years ago & seeing the Prince Consort engine all painted up & effortlessly gliding through its cycle.

Engine house at rear, boiler house in foreground

The brickwork was exceptional all the way around

The Prince Consort’s flywheel – note the trimming on the guard rail

Looking up to the Prince Consort’s beam – flywheel connecting rod in front of pump connecting rods

Counter beam on left, top of the low & intermediate cylinders

End of the main beam looking down on top of drive cylinders

More superb Victorian detailing

Unrestored beams

Just in case there’s anyone left wondering how this thing worked

Just in case there’s anyone left wondering how this thing worked

The rest of my photos from the visit are here. I left wishing I didn’t have a gammy shoulder & was staying around here a bit longer so that I might volunteer a bit – a fantastic historical project all round.

engineering, roadtrip, travel, USA

Boeing Factory

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One of the few things I knew about Seattle before visiting was that the world’s largest volume building (13.4 million cubic metres on a 40 hectare footprint) was around. That alone was enough to go & visit the Boeing assembly plant, but with my interest in manufacturing it was a must – plus planes are just cool. Unsurprisingly, no cameras are allowed on the tour so you’ll just have to believe me that it is a big facility. We saw the assembly lines for the 747, 777 & 787 Dreamliner from high up above the floor. Naturally there were a whole lot of workstations, but being a Saturday backshift there wasn’t a lot of activity. The group wasn’t too big & the guide very informative – & clearly loving her job. Back at the Visitor Center it was great to get outside, enjoy the sun & watch a couple of WWII warbirds fly past twice. There was easily a few billion dollars of planes sitting around too.

A 747 tail

Traveling north we made another brief detour to Burlington (finally found the B in BNSF) to hunt down a dog-bone for my bike – they didn’t have one but I ended up with a pannier brace to hopefully do the job. With thirteen states, seventy-nine days & over 20000 km (12500 miles) of driving, almost 1000 km of mountain-biking over 80 hours we left the States & they let us back in to Canada. What a fantastic time we’ve had & every day we still see little things around that remind us just how much we’ve seen around the west-USA.  Not to mention all the fantastic riding I’ve done in some really great places.  If I was ever back for any length of time I think I’d spend a lot of time riding in Colorado, Wyoming, Idaho & Oregon.

We eventually met Karin near a beach (it was the first sunny day in Vancouver in months) to grab the keys to let ourselves in to her & Adam’s apartment. Very blessed to be staying in a home for a while, for the second time in the trip & also within a week.