One thing missed: "Threading the needle" at Tottenham Court Road. One of the tunnels has less than one meter clearance on one side and about 1 meter clearance on the other side to avoid another underground tunnel and a set of escalators!
@@roberthurley3941 He started this channel and solely owns it, solely owns business blaze, solely owns the Simon Whistler show, and is or was an equal partner in today I found out. Not really sure where you got your information lol
Simon, my thanks to you and your team for this installment. I lived in London in the early 2000's and often roamed all over the Underground simply to see what was above ground at the next stop.I was frequently suprised! I am wondering if you would be looking at the story of the undergound segment on the Eurostar high speed line that was built up to St Pancras? As I recall, a fiasco occurred where the TBM activity caused the subsidence of at least 3 or 4 back yards in London that were perched above the path of progress, the home owners returned after a day at work to find their back yards had completely dissappeared and been replaced by fresh concrete...not a BBq or Potrose in sight! This is history that deserves to be told!
@@jackcallahan1848 Yeah but Simon doesn't seem to be evil. I guess neither did Disney Simon might be part of the illuminati and that's how he's got so many channels!
while BER is will always be there to provide all of us with a good laugh, it looks like your prediction turns out not to be true... all safety tests were successfully completed last week, so it appears to be true this time and the new airport (well actually it's just a new terminal on the same premises where the old East-German SXF used to be) will finally open on October, 31st this year
@@toker6664 well, the old SXF airport used to have two very close runways, so they could not be operated independently. As a result the northern of those two runways was closed and the new "airport"/terminal was constructed to the south of the former southern runway with a completely new runway to the south of that. So the old south SXF runway is now the new BER north runway. With the new setup the two runways can be used independently, which makes them able to handle a lot more traffic. But a part of the runway and taxiway structure, as well as navigation aids for aircraft were able to stay the way they were. Of course all the surroundings are completely new, such as the subway that connects to the city center or parking lots, drop off areas and so on. Basically the whole "landside" infrastructure is new, while a part of the "airside" infrastructure was reused
@@cedricfranzen8558 thank you very thorough answer, as in some house renovations its cheaper to demolish and rebuild, would it of been better to start from scratch? But the comedy of errors as a Brit we get told how efficient Germans are is funny
Undersea cables would be a good out of sight mega project to cover in a future episode.
4 роки тому+1
That would be a great video. So glad to see members of the LGBTQ community making videos like this. That person has the courage to face the world every day!
I was going to mention the airport! It started as a great idea everyone couldn't wait for, and now everyone just takes it for granted that it's basically a mafia front and embezzlement scheme that will never be completed.
Watching a documentary on it, the "threading the eye of the needle" bit was impressive. They had to get the boring machine through a gap between one underground tunnel and an escalator, 35cm in one direction, 85cm in the other. The trains still ran through the tunnel. They also had to dig holes, then have radiating tubes from the hole, to inject concrete under pressure to push buildings up if any of the hundreds of laser rangefinders found any movement in the building.
It gets like this in Tokyo as well - there are Tokyo metro stations that are curved - bith vertically and horizontally! As thats the only way to fit the stations between all the other metro, local train, Shinkansen & highway tunnels.
Whenever I visit London, I try to stay on the Circle Line and other less commuter-burdened lines as much as possible, if I'm not walking. I also try to time my travel outside rush hour(s). I mean, I'm a tourist... I try to stay out of the way of locals who are trying to live their lives in one of the busiest cities on the planet. It's just good manners.
Sensible. I love seeing tourists in London but if they're on the tube at 08.30 without luggage (so they're not going to an airport/train station etc) then I do shake my head a wee bit. Just take an extra half hour in bed and have a lazy b'fast, please!
As a Londoner i'd say dont bother getting the tube in Zone 1 unless you are really stretched for time, most things are in easy walking distance and you'll see more of the city above ground anyway
When I moved I purposely chose to live in an area on the district line so I can commute on the least polluted and crowded tube line. It's a little slow, but I'd rather have a comfortable journey that takes a few minutes longer.
@@larryscott3982 Took me a long time to learn that the tunnels were originally dug and used by the LEP collider (Large Electron-Positron collider) and merely reused for the LHC (though only the tunnels: little of the actual equipment is the same, some of the enormous magnets used in some of the current detectors are from past detectors). The use of old colliders as current booster accelerators interests me. They're doing something at (I think) Fermilab to improve luminosity (the 'flow rate' of the particles) that is mostly replacing an almost-antique small circular accelerator with current technology. So booster rings must be pretty important. The LHC itself will likely become one when a new collider is built at CERN - unless the premier world site moves elsewhere due to politics. But they're two reasons why it's useful to build on top of a fairly modern existing installation. I really hope to see the LHC (or Fermilab's largest ring - the Tevatron?) become merely a booster for a project another order of magnitude more powerful in a few decades. They are magnificent engineering. I guess Crossrail for minuture "hyperloop" trains, with several enormous MRI machines for stations, is pretty close to what they really are. Large is a popular name in big science projects now, like the imaginative Very Large Telescope, Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, LUVOIR, the Extremely Large Array, and the European Extremely Large Telescope (getting very serious with the Large-ity now. Ludicrously Large Telescope? We have a Very Long Baseline Array now too, when it is relatively small, a radio interferometer should be called the Unnecessarily Long Array. The Extremely Non-Compact Telescope and if built in England then we could have an Awfully Large Particle Collider use an existing Rather Big Accelerator as it's booster ring. Meanwhile America may as well build the Bigger-Than-Yours Space Telescope. I find it funny in a way because they'll *almost all* seem quite small (and possibly even be visitor centres for curiosity of how telescopes used to be) by the end of the century, at least I hope so! At least be toys for PhD students to use, not the cutting edge of feasibility that there are years-long queues for having your observations carried out on.
Love it! Side note though. Crossrail (I’m not calling it the other thing) actually has provision built into it to have trains up to 11 cars (250m) in length and the signalling can handle up to 30 trains per hour if required.
I was very involved with the Testing and commissioning of Ottawa, Canada’s new rail line. Only 12.5km long and it took a good 3 years to get running... Don’t envy the team working on that system!
@@djscottdog1 2 questions from a guy from the US, steak mince=ground beef? Is there some joke I'm missing to your comment or was a comment deleted in the interim?
@@skizzik121 yeah tho steak mince is a good cut of meat ground. I think i replyed to the wrong coment , thanks to the new comment section taking me out due to adds, i hate youtube. Some was saying they think that it shouldnt cost more than £1 for each pound of earth removed from tge tunnle
@@djscottdog1 gotcha, yeah we just call our ground beef made from "better" cuts; ground "that cut". Ground ribeye, ground chuck and so on. Well I wish you luck fighting with the comment monster
I would love to see an update to this when the line is completed and fully open. Fascinating project. Shame it's so expensive otherwise systems like this could be built all over the world.
3:15 I love how you used a pre-1974 photo of Hawker Siddeley Tridents in the colours of BEA, or British European Airways! Wonderful slice of British aviation history there, so it is!
Thanks for this one. Having lived in London for several years I can appreciate improvements in the public transport. It's ****! And staying in London here is a suggestion: The sewer system designed by Joseph Bazalgette. A amazing improvement which have saved many lives!
Nice topic! One that has aroused my curiosity on a number of occasions, but I have never seemed to find the time to delve into it.................now I know all of the basics, and can surely find an opportunity to "dig" a bit deeper into the aspects tht most interest me. Thank you!
The eastern and western parts of the Crossrail are complete, it's just the central section that's not finished. Paddington-Reading and Liverpool Street-Shenfield are open.
One thing I found fascinating regarding cross rail was the 3d visualisation of underground London - threading the tunnels around, under and over existing tunnels, sewers and deep pilings of sky scrappers. I remember all the seismic monitoring around all the historic buildings in central London, and I rode Crossrail trains from Hayes & Harlington to Paddington - very nice too!
I really appreciate the fact that he always states both metric and imperial units, allows everyone to enjoy the content with the units they're comfortable with
Now that crossrail is nearly completed, I have never understood why they don't just crack on with crossrail 2? All the skills that have been accumulated with the building of the first project would then be carried over to the next. Many of the problems that have inevitably plagued a project of this complexity have been solved and with the teams and skillsets acquired, could then be carried forward to the next phase. Instead they wait 10 years then start again from scratch and hit the same snags and cost overruns that the first project had.
I OFFER YOU THIS Wow, Simon gets *more* toned-down than this? I didn’t realize his dial had that low a setting.... Guess I’ve been watching too much Business Blaze 😂
A suggestion for a next one on the same line (no pun intended, tho it was tempting): the French Grand Paris Express, with more than 200km of automatic express metro lines and 50 plus stations...
The circular line they’re building, line 15, as part of the Grand Paris Express is absolutely mouthwatering. It will link regional centers and desaturate the core of Paris. Amazing project.
There will of course be a hiatus on all this stuff as the banksters deliberately tip the world into another depression,followed by the obligatory war....followed by Israel invading Lebanon and forcing a massive refugee crisis pouring into Europe....
Mr. Whistler: You have done it again. Wonderful tour through history and a mega-project. Thank you. For some unknown reason to me, I am an Anglophile, and when I see stuff like this, I can only be fascinated. The archeology mentions are, of course the fascinating back story; real humans many years old -- what was their story, their loved ones, their daily lives? Thank you so much.
@@skizzik121 They do a lot of cool things, but they're having a rough go of it. The government have given them quite large loans to stay afloat. They had to sell off their turboprop division a while back. www.cbc.ca/news/business/bombardier-cutting-5000-jobs-q-series-1.4896753
Great video!! I'm going to school to be a civil engineer so I appreciate this channel a lot! Some suggestions for other projects would be the Big Dig in Boston, high speed rail in China and Japan (or anywhere really). Also the tunnel underneath New York City that just got completed, it took 50 years to build it.
Having spent a year designing stations on Crossrail, it's pretty refreshing to hear people sounding enthusiastic about it 😂 beyond that, good fact checking, all nice and accurate 👍 that and don't believe the opening date, reckon there's a few more years of slip in that yet... but hopefully not full fiasco status, no missing smoke alarms here!!
@@nicolasblume1046 The work's still going on, so there's still time to go chase your dream! I worked as an ergonomist on Crossrail, so I did a lot of work on making sure that the stations work in terms of how people flow through them both on the passenger side and behind the scenes (i.e. making sure the signs make sense and are in the right place, making sure that the station is accessible for those in wheelchairs/those with limited sight, etc). I also did a lot of work on the design of all the back room offices and signalling centres, working out how to ensure that people could still do their day to day work whilst adhering to the security precautions. These days (and before I worked in railways) I design tanks for the army.
Looking snazzy Simon! Could you consider doing a bit about the old bits of London that have been found during demolition/construction and preserved? Also the foot tunnel built from Greenwich to Woolich? As a London born (now trendy East End lol) I don't miss the filth of a day seeing the sights via the tube or the ear popping tunnels :-)
For me, a Megaprojects episode that would be more interesting, would be how the original rail line was built, without modern machines that bore holes and how air was circulated in the tunnels. Or how mega structures of the ancient times, aqueducts of Roman times, Machu Picchu, Great Wall of China, the number of stones and how they were transported. Or even the generations that took to build European cathedrals. Those, were megaprojects.
Suggestion for another video: The replacement of the Alaskan Way Viaduct in Seattle with a bored tunnel underneath the downtown area of the city. You could discuss the following: - The construction of the Alaskan Way Viaduct. - The damage to the viaduct caused by the Nisqually earthquake in 2001, as well as the collapse of the similarly designed Cypress Street Viaduct in San Francisco during the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake. - The construction of the tunnel itself, which was accomplished through the use of the world's largest earth pressure balance tunnel boring machine, nicknamed "Bertha". - The damage to Bertha that occurred partway through the project which required a "rescue pit" to be dug so that the cutterhead could be lifted out and repaired. - The demolition of the Alaskan Way Viaduct after the tunnel was completed, and the disposition of the rubble including the portion used to fill the Battery Street Tunnel which SR 99 used to pass through. The demolition of the old viaduct is especially interesting as it took place in a busy area and had to be done very carefully to avoid damage to nearby buildings.
12:00 I wanna see a TBN go straight down and beat the Kola borehole record. Hope it has a strong reverse gear and engine when it's time for 1000 tons to climb back out straight up 10 miles.
As an American I really, really appreciate the Imperial conversions. May I ask that you stick with one set order though? Some videos you do Imperial first then Metric and others you do Metric then Imperial. And in some videos you do it both ways. Makes it harder to listen and grasp the scope of what you're saying.
"If you don't like it, then smash that dislike button." Come on, Simon, we LIKE your videos. You do a great job, on ALL of your channels that I've seen! I am VERY impressed with your level of research into the topic at hand, and your "humour" (British spelling; not American spelling [humor]). You are doing alright, Sir! I enjoy your videos, over MANY channels. USA, AZ, TUCSON 🤠👍
Yeah, that's what I think about a lot of roadworks, "This is crap right now but it's going to be awesome when it's done." Great video, keep up the excellent work.
When I lived there my oldest daughter was 5 and because of her wanted to see prime time we road the tube at rush hour.....it was horrible but she had fun. Kids are strange
Very nice video! :D Truly enjoy your style and your pacing. I do have a couple of wishes, which would improve my viewing experience. One major thing would be to use more maps, especially when talking about the different segments of the project and tunnels. Simply stating the names of this tunnel going from here to there if very hard to follow. I'm sure if you are a native Londoner this is not a problem, but being a foreign viewer, even though having been to London lots of times, I would really appreciate this visual aid to help me comprehend the material more. The second comment is when listing numbers. I really appreciate you listing both imperial and metric measurements, but so many numbers listed after each other makes it hard to separate them in my mind. I sometimes lose the "oooh that's much longer/bigger/better" because my brain mixes the imperial and metric numbers up. I find the approach of saying one measurement out loud and showing the other with on-screen text is a much better way of delivering the information. This way I can focus on my hearing if preferring one measurement, or use my eyes if wanting the other. Don't know if you actually read through comments, just wanted to leave my little input.
I think my girlfriend said it the best. There's being British and being a Londoner; it's like two different worlds London is the only city where you feel like only London Exists.
I'd love to see a video on the Channel Tunnel, as well as the Dutch Delta Works :). I love how you keep a lot of humour in these videos instead if cutting it out.
Another amazing underground mega project that not many know about is the Grasberg mining complex in Indonesia. Built in the tops of the mountains, near glaciers, but supplied from the lowlands at the beach. It’s was one of the largest open pit mines in the world and is one of the most productive underground mines ever built, using the caving mining method. There’s a lot to unpack, and it’s a fascinating history.
Hey Simon! Couldn't help but notice that there's a rowing machine in the background of the video. This got me thinking about a few things, and ummm.... I would LOVE to see a workout routine video on the channel in the future. Perhaps even an upload covering how you care for your beautiful beard. Xx
Yes, thank you, Simon. Those of us who wait for such things, have been waiting with baited breath for CR for some time, watching the engineering and archeology videos. You might like the history of the SF Bay Area BART system. They laid a lot of track in the initial 3 or 4 phases from the late 60's to sometime in the seventies. It totally shows in the architecture of the stations. Anyway, a bunch of unique stations, a seven mile immersed tube two tunnel section, The section through downtown San Francisco is layered under the underground streetcar stations for a couple miles and 7 combined stations. It used to be featured in a disaster ride at Universal studio tours and they included fictional BART line slung beneath the Golden gate bridge in a Star Trek film... We taxpayers are spending more extending the terminals of each of the lines than they did for the entire system in the beginning, fifty years ago. This decade the debate is over connecting the system at the south end of the Bay- while a new bay crossing is being mumbled about- needed to take the strain and system vulnerability off the solitary Transbay Tube. None of the north bay counties are presently served due to water crossings.
I'm so glad that you put your own maudlin face and overly-gesturing hands on screen so much more than actual content pictures. I'm now in love with you and want to go out on a date with you but I have one question for you first; when you take-off those impressive glasses of yours, does the beard come off too? I'm just sayin'.........
awesome video yet again. such great content and well presented. i think the confederation bridge between PEI and NB Canada is worth an episode of mega projects.
SvenTviking as someone who isn’t from anywhere near London, the piss smell & ps4-exhaust smell that hits the stations with windgusts is considered stinking
12:41 I remember the whole "Boaty McBoatface" thing, and then they named it "Sir David Attenborough". Though, apparently they named one of the submersibles that it carries "Boaty McBoatface".
Do you think you could do a video on the Nevada-Class Battleships as both ships had interesting careers. One of which USS Nevada tried to escape Pearl Harbor, fought at D-Day , Iwo Jima, and Okinawa, and survived 2 atomic bombs. I would say that's a mega ship. Great videos
I left London as a 6year old and now I'm 47 but...... I stil love the City of my birth and as it's the Capital of my Country, I love it even more.🏴🇬🇧✌✌
Really liked that! Would actually love to see one on the New York City Subway. As a New York resident that uses it everyday, I know surprisingly little about its creation and I don’t think that I am the only one.
I can't tell you how many times I've heard people say negative things about London weather. However, I've spent a total of five weeks in London over three visits and it never -- and I mean never -- once rained. Over-cast on a few days, yes, but never rain. For the record, I actually preferred the over-cast days over the sunny ones (didn't have to constantly switch up my sunglasses for my regular ones). Whatever the weather, however, London is amazing.
Incredible project. One of the new tunnels threads between two existing tunnels with less than 1 meter clearance on each side. 3:40: £18.25 billion, that's about $US22.82 billion. I might mention here that Doha, Qatar (pop 956,460) has just recently completed construction of its state of the art, fully automatic, driverless (which means you can stand up the front of the train where the driver would be) underground Metro system at a cost of $US36 billion. The project used 21 TBMs (Guinness record) and the final design of the stations was chosen by the Emir himself (gasp). A single fare is 2 Qatari Rials which is about 44p, and a day pass is 6 Qatari Rials which is about £1.32. There is a shuttle bus service going through the suburbs to pick you up and take you to your station. The shuttle bus service is free.
I'm happy to hear you want to cover topics that aren't obvious "Mega projects" but are and are entertaining stories, nonetheless. Thanks for your consistent quality content!
You missed a Ronnie Barker sketch from Porridge .... "Mackay: for future reference. I just want to know how they disposed of the soil?? Fletch: They dug another tunnel and put the earth down there."
What London needs next is Crossrail 2. Being from the UK, but not anywhere near London, I always jump with joy every time major projects for London are announced while the rest of the UK is forgotten. British sarcasm, the best in the World
Used to work on Crossrail back in 2012-2014. One thing I learned was that original budget on projects like this is always way below a realistic estimation. So when someone says that project is over budget, reality is it is not really over budget. Construction companies try to make their bid for project cheapest possible. Barely at breakeven point. Way they make money is they bet on other companies running late on their part of work, thus delaying everyone else. Once there is a delay, a construction company claims a delay penalty to the government. Politicians in the meantime mostly care to get re-elected. It means that majority of projects are being awarded to the companies offering smallest estimation for construction costs in their bid in a project tender. It looks great to the electorate. Once the project runs over its budget, politicians simply blame construction companies that were never have been able to deliver a project under the original price, in the first place. Yet everyone is happy. Construction companies are making profit, people have their elected representatives threatening “greedy” companies and politicians are happy getting elected again.
Great video! Could you do a Megaprojects on the Old River Control Structure? It regulates the flow of water from the Mississippi into the Atchafalaya River, thereby preventing the Mississippi River from changing course.
🤭 I also did as you and your friend. Cabbing through London, et al, was expensive but far more preferable ! The Cabbies were fabulous company and we had fabulous conversation about many, many things of London and history. Would London qualify as a Mega Project ? Luv the Brits !
One thing missed:
"Threading the needle" at Tottenham Court Road. One of the tunnels has less than one meter clearance on one side and about 1 meter clearance on the other side to avoid another underground tunnel and a set of escalators!
You should do a video called “Simon Whistler taking over UA-cam. The ultimate mega project” 😂
14rs2 sad part is Simon just does what he is told to. He is just face and a voice.
@@roberthurley3941 He started this channel and solely owns it, solely owns business blaze, solely owns the Simon Whistler show, and is or was an equal partner in today I found out.
Not really sure where you got your information lol
I'll start a Kickstarter for a youtube channel, we'll see how far it gets
@@roberthurley3941 strange narrative
or a Today I found out video on how Simon Whistler took over UA-cam
Simon needs to start a few more youtube channels. There's still about 1.5 hours of the day that I'm not getting Whistlered™️.
Yes, More channels Please!
Simon, my thanks to you and your team for this installment. I lived in London in the early 2000's and often roamed all over the Underground simply to see what was above ground at the next stop.I was frequently suprised! I am wondering if you would be looking at the story of the undergound segment on the Eurostar high speed line that was built up to St Pancras? As I recall, a fiasco occurred where the TBM activity caused the subsidence of at least 3 or 4 back yards in London that were perched above the path of progress, the home owners returned after a day at work to find their back yards had completely dissappeared and been replaced by fresh concrete...not a BBq or Potrose in sight! This is history that deserves to be told!
Every UA-cam channel will be Simon whistler’s by the end of the crisis.
Blue Watson it’s just like Disney
@@jackcallahan1848 Yeah but Simon doesn't seem to be evil. I guess neither did Disney
Simon might be part of the illuminati and that's how he's got so many channels!
Jack Callhoon beards for the beard god
Better than ANY Soul Media channel.
Fucking liberal piece of shit this simon fuck
I mean, Crossrail will likely still be opened before the German Airport - its a low bar, but its still there
while BER is will always be there to provide all of us with a good laugh, it looks like your prediction turns out not to be true... all safety tests were successfully completed last week, so it appears to be true this time and the new airport (well actually it's just a new terminal on the same premises where the old East-German SXF used to be) will finally open on October, 31st this year
@@cedricfranzen8558 really just a terminal thats even worse, the infrastructure was there already wow
Cedric Franzen Easy money says it gets delayed. Again.
@@toker6664 well, the old SXF airport used to have two very close runways, so they could not be operated independently. As a result the northern of those two runways was closed and the new "airport"/terminal was constructed to the south of the former southern runway with a completely new runway to the south of that. So the old south SXF runway is now the new BER north runway. With the new setup the two runways can be used independently, which makes them able to handle a lot more traffic. But a part of the runway and taxiway structure, as well as navigation aids for aircraft were able to stay the way they were. Of course all the surroundings are completely new, such as the subway that connects to the city center or parking lots, drop off areas and so on. Basically the whole "landside" infrastructure is new, while a part of the "airside" infrastructure was reused
@@cedricfranzen8558 thank you very thorough answer, as in some house renovations its cheaper to demolish and rebuild, would it of been better to start from scratch? But the comedy of errors as a Brit we get told how efficient Germans are is funny
Undersea cables would be a good out of sight mega project to cover in a future episode.
That would be a great video. So glad to see members of the LGBTQ community making videos like this. That person has the courage to face the world every day!
Those cables have always fascinated me. Great suggestion! 👍
patrick quinn ????? What does that have to do with the topic at hand here. People aren’t here to rag on onyone, but to learn.
@@trashyhobo4957 Don't feed the trolls. 😉
@@goosebump801 same
London Taxi Drivers: "Simon's here..... lets get that cruise booked"
3 billion pounds over budget...
Laughs in Berlin airport
or french new nuclear powerplant
Or the world trade center complex
Stuttgart 21
Are you guys making a list for Simon? 😂Megaprojects that were way over budget
I was going to mention the airport! It started as a great idea everyone couldn't wait for, and now everyone just takes it for granted that it's basically a mafia front and embezzlement scheme that will never be completed.
Simon: "With monstrous german engineering ofcourse!"
Me, a history buff: wait, wheres this going simon?!
Zee Germans couldn't take over by blowing everything up so now they've decided to just build everything
Watching a documentary on it, the "threading the eye of the needle" bit was impressive. They had to get the boring machine through a gap between one underground tunnel and an escalator, 35cm in one direction, 85cm in the other. The trains still ran through the tunnel.
They also had to dig holes, then have radiating tubes from the hole, to inject concrete under pressure to push buildings up if any of the hundreds of laser rangefinders found any movement in the building.
It gets like this in Tokyo as well - there are Tokyo metro stations that are curved - bith vertically and horizontally! As thats the only way to fit the stations between all the other metro, local train, Shinkansen & highway tunnels.
Simon : London trains are crazy overcrowded.
Mumbai Trains : Hold my beer
Tokyo comes to mind. What city’s subway system isn’t running above designed capacity?
Paris: "Hold my wine."
How do they compare to Delhi? In my experience Delhi's trains were a lot worse than London's.
Yeah, you win. XD XD
Larry Scott Yeah, but to be fair the trains in Tokyo are quite modern, fast, and somehow very clean.
Whenever I visit London, I try to stay on the Circle Line and other less commuter-burdened lines as much as possible, if I'm not walking. I also try to time my travel outside rush hour(s). I mean, I'm a tourist... I try to stay out of the way of locals who are trying to live their lives in one of the busiest cities on the planet. It's just good manners.
Sensible. I love seeing tourists in London but if they're on the tube at 08.30 without luggage (so they're not going to an airport/train station etc) then I do shake my head a wee bit. Just take an extra half hour in bed and have a lazy b'fast, please!
No one noticed your absence.
@@negativeindustrial i believe that is the point of their action
As a Londoner i'd say dont bother getting the tube in Zone 1 unless you are really stretched for time, most things are in easy walking distance and you'll see more of the city above ground anyway
When I moved I purposely chose to live in an area on the district line so I can commute on the least polluted and crowded tube line. It's a little slow, but I'd rather have a comfortable journey that takes a few minutes longer.
Please do a video on ITER Tokamak and CERN Large Hadron Collider
Yesssss
LHC CERN, and FermiLab. And SLAC, or other.
Gotta include what lead up to the LHC for comparison.
Das ist eine Güt idee.
@@larryscott3982 Took me a long time to learn that the tunnels were originally dug and used by the LEP collider (Large Electron-Positron collider) and merely reused for the LHC (though only the tunnels: little of the actual equipment is the same, some of the enormous magnets used in some of the current detectors are from past detectors).
The use of old colliders as current booster accelerators interests me. They're doing something at (I think) Fermilab to improve luminosity (the 'flow rate' of the particles) that is mostly replacing an almost-antique small circular accelerator with current technology. So booster rings must be pretty important. The LHC itself will likely become one when a new collider is built at CERN - unless the premier world site moves elsewhere due to politics. But they're two reasons why it's useful to build on top of a fairly modern existing installation. I really hope to see the LHC (or Fermilab's largest ring - the Tevatron?) become merely a booster for a project another order of magnitude more powerful in a few decades.
They are magnificent engineering. I guess Crossrail for minuture "hyperloop" trains, with several enormous MRI machines for stations, is pretty close to what they really are.
Large is a popular name in big science projects now, like the imaginative Very Large Telescope, Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, LUVOIR, the Extremely Large Array, and the European Extremely Large Telescope (getting very serious with the Large-ity now. Ludicrously Large Telescope? We have a Very Long Baseline Array now too, when it is relatively small, a radio interferometer should be called the Unnecessarily Long Array. The Extremely Non-Compact Telescope and if built in England then we could have an Awfully Large Particle Collider use an existing Rather Big Accelerator as it's booster ring. Meanwhile America may as well build the Bigger-Than-Yours Space Telescope.
I find it funny in a way because they'll *almost all* seem quite small (and possibly even be visitor centres for curiosity of how telescopes used to be) by the end of the century, at least I hope so! At least be toys for PhD students to use, not the cutting edge of feasibility that there are years-long queues for having your observations carried out on.
"...there have been many plagues." *AHH!!* I laughed a little too hard at that one.
Love it! Side note though. Crossrail (I’m not calling it the other thing) actually has provision built into it to have trains up to 11 cars (250m) in length and the signalling can handle up to 30 trains per hour if required.
I was very involved with the Testing and commissioning of Ottawa, Canada’s new rail line. Only 12.5km long and it took a good 3 years to get running... Don’t envy the team working on that system!
13.26 "IINGDOM"!? Surely should read "KINGDOM"? Otherwise, great video as always, thanks
Well a pound of steak mince if £8 so your gonna be stuck eating bags of flour mate
@@djscottdog1 2 questions from a guy from the US, steak mince=ground beef? Is there some joke I'm missing to your comment or was a comment deleted in the interim?
@@skizzik121 yeah tho steak mince is a good cut of meat ground. I think i replyed to the wrong coment , thanks to the new comment section taking me out due to adds, i hate youtube. Some was saying they think that it shouldnt cost more than £1 for each pound of earth removed from tge tunnle
@@djscottdog1 gotcha, yeah we just call our ground beef made from "better" cuts; ground "that cut". Ground ribeye, ground chuck and so on. Well I wish you luck fighting with the comment monster
how the hell did that make it through editing?...
Where does all the dirt go? If digging tunnels in Minecraft has taught me anything, you fill up a couple of chests and toss the rest in lava.
The soil from tunnelling has been transported to the Thames estuary and is being used to create a nature habitat for water birds
should have used it to build an airport in Thames estuary
You just need to dig a hole 2 blocks deep, throw in whatever you don't want, then cover up the top.
Inside the workers' trousers - and is dropped discretely when they get out on the streets again...
They dug another tunnel to put all the dirt in.
I would love to see an update to this when the line is completed and fully open. Fascinating project. Shame it's so expensive otherwise systems like this could be built all over the world.
The underground in St. Petersburg is practically a museum.
I Know. It's indeed beautiful!!👍👍
Yeah, Russia doesn’t fuck around when it comes to their subway stations!
This reminds me of an old joke about NYC I used to hear all the time: "It's going to be a great city when they finish building it!"
You gotta keep building
We have been building London for 2000 years. Hoping to get it finished real soon...
London and New York City are the only 2 cities that matter
A moment of silence for digger mcdiggerface. the name that should have been
BOOOOOOORRIIIIIIIINNNNGGG would have been my choice
3:15 I love how you used a pre-1974 photo of Hawker Siddeley Tridents in the colours of BEA, or British European Airways! Wonderful slice of British aviation history there, so it is!
Thanks for this one. Having lived in London for several years I can appreciate improvements in the public transport. It's ****! And staying in London here is a suggestion: The sewer system designed by Joseph Bazalgette. A amazing improvement which have saved many lives!
Nice topic! One that has aroused my curiosity on a number of occasions, but I have never seemed to find the time to delve into it.................now I know all of the basics, and can surely find an opportunity to "dig" a bit deeper into the aspects tht most interest me. Thank you!
The eastern and western parts of the Crossrail are complete, it's just the central section that's not finished. Paddington-Reading and Liverpool Street-Shenfield are open.
One thing I found fascinating regarding cross rail was the 3d visualisation of underground London - threading the tunnels around, under and over existing tunnels, sewers and deep pilings of sky scrappers. I remember all the seismic monitoring around all the historic buildings in central London, and I rode Crossrail trains from Hayes & Harlington to Paddington - very nice too!
I was really hoping for Diggery McDiggerface...
I really appreciate the fact that he always states both metric and imperial units, allows everyone to enjoy the content with the units they're comfortable with
Now that crossrail is nearly completed, I have never understood why they don't just crack on with crossrail 2? All the skills that have been accumulated with the building of the first project would then be carried over to the next. Many of the problems that have inevitably plagued a project of this complexity have been solved and with the teams and skillsets acquired, could then be carried forward to the next phase. Instead they wait 10 years then start again from scratch and hit the same snags and cost overruns that the first project had.
Great subject, thanks to you and the team for the work on this. Cheers.
I like the off-script asides. Casual and personable.
I OFFER YOU THIS Wow, Simon gets *more* toned-down than this? I didn’t realize his dial had that low a setting.... Guess I’ve been watching too much Business Blaze 😂
The outro music is absolutely killer! Keep up the good work Simon!
The snowy mountain hydroelectric scheme in Australia would be an interesting mega project to look at.
Am enjoying and learning from your vids.
Thank you, Simon, for excellent work, and I include Thanks to the Crew.
A suggestion for a next one on the same line (no pun intended, tho it was tempting): the French Grand Paris Express, with more than 200km of automatic express metro lines and 50 plus stations...
The circular line they’re building, line 15, as part of the Grand Paris Express is absolutely mouthwatering. It will link regional centers and desaturate the core of Paris. Amazing project.
There will of course be a hiatus on all this stuff as the banksters deliberately tip the world into another depression,followed by the obligatory war....followed by Israel invading Lebanon and forcing a massive refugee crisis pouring into Europe....
Mr. Whistler: You have done it again. Wonderful tour through history and a mega-project. Thank you. For some unknown reason to me, I am an Anglophile, and when I see stuff like this, I can only be fascinated. The archeology mentions are, of course the fascinating back story; real humans many years old -- what was their story, their loved ones, their daily lives?
Thank you so much.
Canadians: "Trains built by Bomb-bar-dee-yay"
correct
Bombardier is so awesome even us Americans are proud that they are made in our hat!
@@skizzik121 They do a lot of cool things, but they're having a rough go of it. The government have given them quite large loans to stay afloat. They had to sell off their turboprop division a while back. www.cbc.ca/news/business/bombardier-cutting-5000-jobs-q-series-1.4896753
Love that name and the C jet
@@skizzik121 : Eh?
Love this episode. Looking for an update.
0:30 - Chapter 1 - A city pushing forward
4:10 - Chapter 2 - A new way to travel
5:35 - Chapter 3 - Victims of its success
7:20 - Chapter 4 - Original Purpose
8:45 - Chapter 5 - Construction
10:35 - Chapter 6 - Tunnels
14:25 - Chapter 7 - Trains
15:35 - Chapter 8 - Accidents & controversy
16:40 - Chapter 9 - Digging through history
- Chapter 10 -
Great video!! I'm going to school to be a civil engineer so I appreciate this channel a lot! Some suggestions for other projects would be the Big Dig in Boston, high speed rail in China and Japan (or anywhere really). Also the tunnel underneath New York City that just got completed, it took 50 years to build it.
Having spent a year designing stations on Crossrail, it's pretty refreshing to hear people sounding enthusiastic about it 😂 beyond that, good fact checking, all nice and accurate 👍 that and don't believe the opening date, reckon there's a few more years of slip in that yet... but hopefully not full fiasco status, no missing smoke alarms here!!
OMG, that would be my dream job!
What was your career building up to this and what exactly was your position?
@@nicolasblume1046 The work's still going on, so there's still time to go chase your dream!
I worked as an ergonomist on Crossrail, so I did a lot of work on making sure that the stations work in terms of how people flow through them both on the passenger side and behind the scenes (i.e. making sure the signs make sense and are in the right place, making sure that the station is accessible for those in wheelchairs/those with limited sight, etc). I also did a lot of work on the design of all the back room offices and signalling centres, working out how to ensure that people could still do their day to day work whilst adhering to the security precautions.
These days (and before I worked in railways) I design tanks for the army.
Lovely work Simon. Loving this channel.
Simon's newest channel, "People who have never been in my garage" is doing well..
Now that's a channel a guy could get behind!! Heckin yes!
Looking snazzy Simon!
Could you consider doing a bit about the old bits of London that have been found during demolition/construction and preserved? Also the foot tunnel built from Greenwich to Woolich?
As a London born (now trendy East End lol) I don't miss the filth of a day seeing the sights via the tube or the ear popping tunnels :-)
For me, a Megaprojects episode that would be more interesting, would be how the original rail line was built, without modern machines that bore holes and how air was circulated in the tunnels. Or how mega structures of the ancient times, aqueducts of Roman times, Machu Picchu, Great Wall of China, the number of stones and how they were transported.
Or even the generations that took to build European cathedrals. Those, were megaprojects.
Jimmy Yu is there documentation to tell us how they transported the stones?
Suggestion for another video: The replacement of the Alaskan Way Viaduct in Seattle with a bored tunnel underneath the downtown area of the city. You could discuss the following:
- The construction of the Alaskan Way Viaduct.
- The damage to the viaduct caused by the Nisqually earthquake in 2001, as well as the collapse of the similarly designed Cypress Street Viaduct in San Francisco during the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake.
- The construction of the tunnel itself, which was accomplished through the use of the world's largest earth pressure balance tunnel boring machine, nicknamed "Bertha".
- The damage to Bertha that occurred partway through the project which required a "rescue pit" to be dug so that the cutterhead could be lifted out and repaired.
- The demolition of the Alaskan Way Viaduct after the tunnel was completed, and the disposition of the rubble including the portion used to fill the Battery Street Tunnel which SR 99 used to pass through.
The demolition of the old viaduct is especially interesting as it took place in a busy area and had to be done very carefully to avoid damage to nearby buildings.
12:00 I wanna see a TBN go straight down and beat the Kola borehole record. Hope it has a strong reverse gear and engine when it's time for 1000 tons to climb back out straight up 10 miles.
I really liked this video Simon! Love the new channel and the bits of history you throw in. I think we have a keeper! 👍🏼
As an American I really, really appreciate the Imperial conversions.
May I ask that you stick with one set order though? Some videos you do Imperial first then Metric and others you do Metric then Imperial. And in some videos you do it both ways.
Makes it harder to listen and grasp the scope of what you're saying.
I always thought of St. Mary Axe as a big ass Faberge Egg, not so much as a "gherkin"🤣
"If you don't like it, then smash that dislike button."
Come on, Simon, we LIKE your videos. You do a great job, on ALL of your channels that I've seen!
I am VERY impressed with your level of research into the topic at hand, and your "humour" (British spelling; not American spelling [humor]).
You are doing alright, Sir! I enjoy your videos, over MANY channels.
USA, AZ, TUCSON 🤠👍
Yeah, that's what I think about a lot of roadworks, "This is crap right now but it's going to be awesome when it's done." Great video, keep up the excellent work.
OG Megaprojects fan here. Who’s with me!
Duall Inselman I believe anybody here would be comsidered an OG fan
But are you a legendary legend?
I'm a raid shadow OG legend
So you have been here for less than 2 months just like the rest of us! Awesome!!!
@Jack Myhre I have been subbed to top Tenz for about 5 years but somehow missed BB until about 6 months ago.... No clue how that happened
Informative, humorous, intelligent and entertaining.
When I lived there my oldest daughter was 5 and because of her wanted to see prime time we road the tube at rush hour.....it was horrible but she had fun. Kids are strange
you should do a video on just tunnel boring machines! I would so enjoy a video on such a megamachne!
yey first comment!
Simon do one about the Antonov 225 Myra please :D ! Keep up the good work!
That's that giant plane or is that the Caspian sea monster?
@@skizzik121 Giant cargo plane.
@@jur4x ok that's what I was thinking, I did give it a quick look up...THAT THING IS GIGANTE!!!!
Very nice video! :D Truly enjoy your style and your pacing. I do have a couple of wishes, which would improve my viewing experience. One major thing would be to use more maps, especially when talking about the different segments of the project and tunnels. Simply stating the names of this tunnel going from here to there if very hard to follow. I'm sure if you are a native Londoner this is not a problem, but being a foreign viewer, even though having been to London lots of times, I would really appreciate this visual aid to help me comprehend the material more.
The second comment is when listing numbers. I really appreciate you listing both imperial and metric measurements, but so many numbers listed after each other makes it hard to separate them in my mind. I sometimes lose the "oooh that's much longer/bigger/better" because my brain mixes the imperial and metric numbers up. I find the approach of saying one measurement out loud and showing the other with on-screen text is a much better way of delivering the information. This way I can focus on my hearing if preferring one measurement, or use my eyes if wanting the other.
Don't know if you actually read through comments, just wanted to leave my little input.
I think my girlfriend said it the best. There's being British and being a Londoner; it's like two different worlds London is the only city where you feel like only London Exists.
Very interesting! Thank you!
its ya boi Simon Whistler!
I'd love to see a video on the Channel Tunnel, as well as the Dutch Delta Works :). I love how you keep a lot of humour in these videos instead if cutting it out.
A to what? To the tower with you, it’s Zed.
The video of the machine placing the concrete blocks is so satisfying, it bores the ground then a attached train places the slabs its like a 3D jigsaw
Not sure how I feel about this... It's missing something, like a script slap!!
Nice update on this enormous project. Pretty interesting series so far (like with the episodes on the Concorde and Tu-144).
How about an episode on ancient Rome's plumbing and road infrastructures. They started it all.
That would be a good idea but pretty done to death on UA-cam don't you think?
Another amazing underground mega project that not many know about is the Grasberg mining complex in Indonesia. Built in the tops of the mountains, near glaciers, but supplied from the lowlands at the beach. It’s was one of the largest open pit mines in the world and is one of the most productive underground mines ever built, using the caving mining method. There’s a lot to unpack, and it’s a fascinating history.
Mars
Literally no one:
Simon: Somewhere i used to live😂(side note)
Hey Simon!
Couldn't help but notice that there's a rowing machine in the background of the video. This got me thinking about a few things, and ummm....
I would LOVE to see a workout routine video on the channel in the future. Perhaps even an upload covering how you care for your beautiful beard.
Xx
"people die mysteriously, the british blame "bad air""
some things never change...
Haha😆
Try disproving the miasma theory whilst hovering over an ebola victim...
Yes, thank you, Simon. Those of us who wait for such things, have been waiting with baited breath for CR for some time, watching the engineering and archeology videos.
You might like the history of the SF Bay Area BART system. They laid a lot of track in the initial 3 or 4 phases from the late 60's to sometime in the seventies. It totally shows in the architecture of the stations. Anyway, a bunch of unique stations, a seven mile immersed tube two tunnel section, The section through downtown San Francisco is layered under the underground streetcar stations for a couple miles and 7 combined stations.
It used to be featured in a disaster ride at Universal studio tours and they included fictional BART line slung beneath the Golden gate bridge in a Star Trek film...
We taxpayers are spending more extending the terminals of each of the lines than they did for the entire system in the beginning, fifty years ago. This decade the debate is over connecting the system at the south end of the Bay- while a new bay crossing is being mumbled about- needed to take the strain and system vulnerability off the solitary Transbay Tube. None of the north bay counties are presently served due to water crossings.
Video ideas:
Cheyenne Mountain Air Force Station
Dubai Palm Island
Looks pretty cool... got some weathering bridges and icy tunnels out here...
I'm so glad that you put your own maudlin face and overly-gesturing hands on screen so much more than actual content pictures. I'm now in love with you and want to go out on a date with you but I have one question for you first; when you take-off those impressive glasses of yours, does the beard come off too? I'm just sayin'.........
awesome video yet again. such great content and well presented. i think the confederation bridge between PEI and NB Canada is worth an episode of mega projects.
the tube's horrific smell is characteristic, in a way
It doesn’t really smell.
SvenTviking as someone who isn’t from anywhere near London, the piss smell & ps4-exhaust smell that hits the stations with windgusts is considered stinking
I like that smell, brings back great memories
12:41 I remember the whole "Boaty McBoatface" thing, and then they named it "Sir David Attenborough". Though, apparently they named one of the submersibles that it carries "Boaty McBoatface".
“THE MOST BADASS MIDDLE NAME... I INGDOM” Oops.
BRILLIANT essay, Simon!
Well in Serbia Belgrade there is story about metro about 100 years lol and construction should start finally in 2020 and guess what corona time lol
Do you think you could do a video on the Nevada-Class Battleships as both ships had interesting careers. One of which USS Nevada tried to escape Pearl Harbor, fought at D-Day , Iwo Jima, and Okinawa, and survived 2 atomic bombs. I would say that's a mega ship. Great videos
"London is no longer an English city" - John Cleese. And 100% right he is!
That’s what happens when you colonise most of the planet. Most of the ethnic minorities in London come from countries the UK used to own.
I left London as a 6year old and now I'm 47 but...... I stil love the City of my birth and as it's the Capital of my Country, I love it even more.🏴🇬🇧✌✌
Love your videos mate.
Really liked that! Would actually love to see one on the New York City Subway. As a New York resident that uses it everyday, I know surprisingly little about its creation and I don’t think that I am the only one.
11:40 Yay!! Tunnel boring machines! Yay!!!
Seriously, I'm *fascinated* by them, they're absolute beasts.
I can't tell you how many times I've heard people say negative things about London weather. However, I've spent a total of five weeks in London over three visits and it never -- and I mean never -- once rained. Over-cast on a few days, yes, but never rain. For the record, I actually preferred the over-cast days over the sunny ones (didn't have to constantly switch up my sunglasses for my regular ones). Whatever the weather, however, London is amazing.
Incredible project. One of the new tunnels threads between two existing tunnels with less than 1 meter clearance on each side.
3:40: £18.25 billion, that's about $US22.82 billion.
I might mention here that Doha, Qatar (pop 956,460) has just recently completed construction of its state of the art, fully automatic, driverless (which means you can stand up the front of the train where the driver would be) underground Metro system at a cost of $US36 billion. The project used 21 TBMs (Guinness record) and the final design of the stations was chosen by the Emir himself (gasp).
A single fare is 2 Qatari Rials which is about 44p, and a day pass is 6 Qatari Rials which is about £1.32.
There is a shuttle bus service going through the suburbs to pick you up and take you to your station.
The shuttle bus service is free.
Damn it Simon, All my notifications are for your videos, but I can't skip any of them because they are so interesting and entertaining!
I'm happy to hear you want to cover topics that aren't obvious "Mega projects" but are and are entertaining stories, nonetheless. Thanks for your consistent quality content!
Really enjoyed this video! These are the kind of projects I find really interesting
You missed a Ronnie Barker sketch from Porridge .... "Mackay: for future reference. I just want to know how they disposed of the soil?? Fletch: They dug another tunnel and put the earth down there."
You know what else is a Meja project?
Watching all of Simon Whistler's content all the way through for the all important legendary watch hours
What London needs next is Crossrail 2. Being from the UK, but not anywhere near London, I always jump with joy every time major projects for London are announced while the rest of the UK is forgotten. British sarcasm, the best in the World
Used to work on Crossrail back in 2012-2014. One thing I learned was that original budget on projects like this is always way below a realistic estimation. So when someone says that project is over budget, reality is it is not really over budget.
Construction companies try to make their bid for project cheapest possible. Barely at breakeven point. Way they make money is they bet on other companies running late on their part of work, thus delaying everyone else. Once there is a delay, a construction company claims a delay penalty to the government. Politicians in the meantime mostly care to get re-elected. It means that majority of projects are being awarded to the companies offering smallest estimation for construction costs in their bid in a project tender. It looks great to the electorate. Once the project runs over its budget, politicians simply blame construction companies that were never have been able to deliver a project under the original price, in the first place. Yet everyone is happy. Construction companies are making profit, people have their elected representatives threatening “greedy” companies and politicians are happy getting elected again.
Great video! Could you do a Megaprojects on the Old River Control Structure? It regulates the flow of water from the Mississippi into the Atchafalaya River, thereby preventing the Mississippi River from changing course.
🤭 I also did as you and your friend. Cabbing through London, et al, was expensive but far more preferable !
The Cabbies were fabulous company and we had fabulous conversation about many, many things of London and history.
Would London qualify as a Mega Project ?
Luv the Brits !