blogs > andrew > engineering

Fri, 11 Jul 2008

The Great Storm of 1703

Looking into disaster scenarios and doing actuarial and engineering forecasts of potential impacts, I came across a fascinating paper about the impact of “The Great Storm of 1703“¹ on southern England and the Channel coast. Obviously this predates modern meteorology, so what makes it interesting is how they modeled what the wind forces likely were.

Given that there is every likelihood that such conditions can arise again, the forecast of the economic impact (specifically, claims in excess of available reinsurance) means such and event would likely have a catastrophic effect on the financial system if it had already been weakened by other difficulties — kind of like as it is at present.

AfC

¹ A 7 page retrospective published in .pdf form by a firm named Risk Management Solutions at their website. The fate of the Eddystone Lighthouse, pictured above, is also interesting.

great-storm-of-1703, posted by Andrew Cowie in /andrew/engineering/background at 08:06, 11 Jul 2008.

Fri, 21 Dec 2007

Innovative uses of bobcats

Ordinarily Rail car movers (aka HiRail trucks) are either enormous ugly yellow painted beasts (which are inevitably maintenance nightmares) or are glorified pickup trucks (which, while great for zooming around to fix a remote signal, that haven’t much hope of actually moving anything). This week, though, I came across an unusual approach to dealing with moving small numbers of cars in an private industrial rail yard that might do the trick. A Canadian company called Brandt Equipment markets a vehicle called the “Rail Yard Boss” which is nothing but a John Deere front loader adapted with rail wheels and a coupler. Photos from their website (I don’t live where there is so much grain, you know?):

The interesting part is that it uses its hoist to transfer some of the weight from the car its pushing to itself, thereby increasing the friction between its wheels and the track, improving its traction as a result. That’s smart.

The advantage over a real switcher, of course, is that it can just up the steel wheels, pivot, and drive out of the way.

On the other hand, given that this thing can only push a max of 5 loaded cars, you’ll probably end up needing a real switcher sooner or later anyway (and what yard doesn’t have a spur as a switching lead to get things out of the way?). Still though, pretty neat.

AfC

rail-yard-boss, posted by Andrew Cowie in /andrew/engineering/railways at 08:38, 21 Dec 2007.

Tue, 18 Dec 2007

On Bridges

Doing some background research for a client I came across a surprisingly comprehensive introductory page about the basics of bridge design. This isn’t Civ Eng stuff by any means, but it’s a great overview of the taxonomy of bridges, with some excellent illustrations:

along with admirably concise descriptions.

The source website is an exhaustive survey of bridges in and around Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA, maintained by one Bruce Cridlebaugh. Though I am sometimes moved to wonder what drives people to such exhaustive efforts, it’s not like people I hang around with aren’t equally obsessed over obscure interests. :)

As websites go, it’s actually surprisingly well laid out. The intro page has a graphic explaining to visitors how to use their site:

“…To choose from a comprehensive listing of structures, (1) go to List by Location, (2) choose a map area, then (3) select from the list for structures in that area…”

Granted, enthusiasm to use this technique oneself is tempered by the obvious hassle of having to create such a graphic in the first place (not to mention that screenshots have a bad habit of getting out of date the moment you alter your stylesheets), but it is nonetheless impressive information density.

AfC

bridge-basics, posted by Andrew Cowie in /andrew/engineering/background at 13:08, 18 Dec 2007.

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