One more from the Beeb's iPlayer:

Engineers building Britain's longest road tunnel have met in the middle after a year of excavation. The 1.9 mile A3 tunnel under Hindhead in Surrey is expected to cost £371m and be completed by 2011. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7913545.stm 

It might just be me, but there's something not quite right with that...

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Surrey will then have not only the oldest road tunnel but the longest as well.

This final link in the dualling of the A3 London-Portsmouth road was a big story round here a year or two back.

That breakthrough looks far too made up to me! What were they tunneling through, sand? 😢

...Lister

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Blimey that wall was flat and a different colour to the stuff behind almost like it had been rendered... plus there are tube thru the wall and cables on the right.... not convinced. 😉

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looked a bit like a dodgy B movie film set!! 😮

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Sounded like the pecker was against a steel ring at one point? 😉

That breakthrough looks far too made up to me! What were they tunneling through, sand? 😢

...Lister

Blimey that wall was flat and a different colour to the stuff behind almost like it had been rendered... plus there are tube thru the wall and cables on the right.... not convinced. 😉

If you watch the one with comentary it explains it, they were digging through sandstone, 1m at a time then spraying it with concrete to stabilise it before digging the next metre; hence the rendered finish.

They also mention a carefully "stage mannaged" breakthrough for the cammeras. :lol:

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cant have sound on as baby sleeping .... ooops

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I worked on tunnelling in Central London for several years and we staged at least two 'breakthroughs' in that time for various parties.

one was for Blue Peter, on the London Water Ring Main at Shepherd's Bush. One of the secretaries played the part of Anthea Turner in the pit bottom, Anthea having refused to go in the manrider skip! The commentary was done by the other presenter, whose name I forget, with the secretary just on the edge of the shot; and it was then intercut with footage of Anthea shot on the sister machine in Amec's yard... the machine had actually been holed through the day before, so a bulkhead of timber was erected and sprayed with grout, and the machine pushed forward and through it. The main problem was stopping all the mashed timber going into the muck conveyor and jamming it, and we actually had the doors closed so that this didn't cause problems.

the other one was on a cable tunnel at Grosvenor Square. Again, the shield ( 7ft hand-shield this time ) was pushed up with a couple of feet of the bulkhead in the reception chamber and we cored through from the centre of the shield, scribed a circle and pre-cut the boards so the shield came through like a cork in a bottle

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It is maybe unstandable that companies want to stage manage these events. Although my memory is not perfect, I am fairly sure that an official, possibly the chairman, of Northumbrian Water was killed at a "holing through" ceremony of the Kielder Tyne Tees Water Tunnel in the late 70's.
Speaking from a media standpoint I can say that very few breakthoughs, openings, closings etc are the real thing and many are shot time and time again to satisfy television crews and arty farty directors who missed the first shoot. Exceptions, of course, are demolition by explosives

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I don't know about any accident at Kielder.

What I do know, is that the less time wasted over this sort of thing, the happier everyone is. And, what the uninformed spectator expects, and what actually appears, tends to be rather different.

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If you want staged breakthroughs what about the Channel Tunnel. I worked on the Southern Running Tunnel. Even our breakthrough into the UK crossover was stage managed and recorded on film. 😉

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Patch said

Speaking from a media standpoint I can say that very few breakthroughs, openings, closings etc. are the real thing

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In my (admittedly limited) experience very little TV is 'real'. I like the exploration shows where our hero abseils into an area and says that "no one has been here for XXX years" ....That is if you exclude the cameraman and possibly sound-man/ lighting man who went in first to record the event

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