Roadwork nightmares

  • Mark07's Avatar
    Community Manager
    Roadworks, they seem to last forever - but this is something else.


    Anyone who drives through South Wales likely has experienced roadworks on the A465, but good news! They are finally expected to finish after 23 years!

    To put that into perspective; petrol cost 69.9p a litre, a pint cost £2.09 and the Euro had just become a currency.

    Do you know a road which seems to be constantly dug up?

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    Thanks,
    Mark.
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  • 11 Replies

  • Drivingforfun's Avatar
    I haven’t properly looked so I might be repeating news hype that isn’t true, though it wouldn’t surprise me if it was true…

    There is a well used road somewhere in the UK that’d had a 50mph speed limit while the category of the road was upgraded to enable motorway speeds

    They recently finished turning it into a dual carriageway, presumably causing lots of pollution, but then imposed a speed limit for environmental reasons … of 50 mph
  • Mark07's Avatar
    Community Manager
    They recently finished turning it into a dual carriageway, presumably causing lots of pollution, but then imposed a speed limit for environmental reasons … of 50 mph

    Sounds about right 😂😂😂
  • Rolebama's Avatar
    Just after the A34 and A44 junction roundabout 'upgrade' was finished, a local resident put in a Freedom of Information request about the cost and time doing the job. He also asked California the same question about rebuilding two-tier road after the earthquake. The cost for the junction was 1.5 times LA rebuild, and double the man-hours. To turn a 2-lane roundabout into a 3-lane roundabout by building another lane across the grass between the four approaches and slapping a bit of white paint down.
  • olduser's Avatar
    Leaving the EU gave them a very big funding problem, the final funding arrangement is not first choice but the best they could do.
    I hope there is a clause in the funding deal to prevent the debt being sold on to other parties, that's what went wrong with PPI.

    When I lived in Wales the old Heads of the valleys road was a big problem for industries in the old mining areas, and was restricting growth, and new industry.

    Costing work like this, particularly in areas like wales, can only ever be a guessing game because of the geological conditions.
    Any quotation has to be on the basis of what is known but everyone must understand there could be unknowns that are know about, and unknown unknowns, and of course these can only evaluated once they are found.
    If estimates of the costs of some known unknowns are included, the chances are the project would never get off the ground.

    I remember being told by the civil engineer who designed and oversaw the building of Cwmbran stadium (athletics)
    They had a series of bore holes drilled on the proposed site for the stadium, collected data on old coalmines (though the stadium is in the valley bottom, the old mines tend to be in the valley sides) and underground waterways.

    The bore holes revealed some rock but mostly heavy clay, almost ideal.
    Work got underway, then they found an enormous cavity under the site.
    The test bore holes just missed it in several places, and the tiny stream, thought to be the cause.
    It took several times more than the projected cost of the stadium to fill in, and stabilise the ground, and redirect the water.
    Of course in those days, no one would know what it had all cost.
    But without the remedial work the site could not be used for a stadium or anything else.
  • Rolebama's Avatar
    When I worked as a plant fitter, I worked for a piling company. The owner's son was responsible for collecting samples and sending them to the laboratory, where the eggheads would work out amounts, depths and widths of piles needed based on weights of proposed buildings. I occasionally went with him. I found it very interesting some of the stuff we used to pull out of the ground. Most notable was seashells and fish bones around six feet down at the top of the Chiltern Hills.
  • olduser's Avatar
    The underlying chalk was certainly formed from shells under a sea but I doubt there would be any shells or fish bones left now.

    The theory goes - the shells fall to the bottom of the sea then they fuse together under the pressure to form chalk rock, eventually the sea is drained away leaving the chalk.
    I have seen indications of shell in chalk but only isolated ones.

    The other option was you were digging into some form of midden.
  • Rolebama's Avatar
    The underlying chalk was certainly formed from shells under a sea but I doubt there would be any shells or fish bones left now.

    The theory goes - the shells fall to the bottom of the sea then they fuse together under the pressure to form chalk rock, eventually the sea is drained away leaving the chalk.
    I have seen indications of shell in chalk but only isolated ones.

    The other option was you were digging into some form of midden.
    I honestly don't know about a midden, but the depth of the shells and bones went from approx six feet from the surface to a depth of around sixty feet. The same result from ten samples taken from an area 100ft square.
  • olduser's Avatar
    Ah, talking to my geological engineers, the suggestion is the sea may have not been deep enough or was not there long enough to complete the rock forming process or the chemical conditions were not right at that time (when the shells were deposited), and the one that examined samples from the Chilterns (to advise on foundations) has seen similar loose shells and fish bones in the samples.
  • Rolebama's Avatar
    FWIW: We used Wembley Laboratories in Hayes, Middlesex for analyzing samples.
  • NMNeil's Avatar
    It's when you have traffic cones reducing the road from two to one lane, and there's no sign of anything being done to the road. Worst of all is when said cones are removed several months later and there's still no indication that anything was ever done to the road.
  • Rolebama's Avatar
    Or when they impose a 30mph limit on the M25 through the variable speed limit because it is thought there might be a storm!?