Episodes

How to Build a Railway is a twelve-part podcast series exploring the story behind the construction of the UK’s new high speed rail line. As the largest single environmental project in the UK, protecting and enhancing the environment has always been an integral part of the HS2 programme. Since 2009, every metre of the design has been carefully considered in navigating sites of natural significance. Episode four, ‘Creating the Green Corridor’, explores our endeavours to protect, replace and impr...

How to Build a Railway is a twelve-part podcast series exploring the story behind the construction of the UK’s new high speed rail line. Over 250 miles of new high speed railway is planned, with trains capable of speeds up to 225mph (360km/h), and linking the biggest cities in Scotland with Manchester, Birmingham and London. This episode of How to build a railway, ‘Preparing the ground’, takes a look at the early construction works that needed to be done on HS2, before building the stations, b...

How to Build a Railway is a twelve-part podcast series exploring the story behind the construction of the UK’s new high speed rail line. This episode, ‘Unearthing History’, explores everything archaeology. HS2’s archaeology programme is a once-in-a-generation opportunity that will allow us to reveal over 10,000 years of British history. As Europe’s biggest dig, HS2’s archaeology programme has provided fascinating insight and discoveries into the lives of the people and communities who made mod...

How to Build a Railway is a twelve-part podcast series exploring the story behind the construction of the UK’s new high speed rail line. This episode focusses on why HS2 is needed, the historical context of our country’s railways, project progress so far and upcoming goals. Guests Bob Gwynne, National Railway Museum Associate Curator. Andrew McNaughton, Former HS2 Chief Engineer. Andy Street, West Midlands Mayor. Mark Thurston, HS2 Chief Executive. Starting back in the 1830’s, Bob sets th...

Engineering Matters is celebrating its fifth anniversary this week. Podcast founders Bernadette Ballantyne and Jon Young, along with the rest of the Engineering Matters team, tell the story of the show’s creation and rapid growth, and share a behind-the-scenes look at how some of our favourite and most popular episodes have been put together. Engineering Matters launched at a time when few had heard of podcasts. We were soon seeing thousands of listeners for each episode. Today, every episode is...

More and more of the economy is being powered by the grid and that trend will continue over the next few decades. At the same time countries are looking to reduce their reliance on coal and gas and use more renewables like solar and wind. Managing the transition to a green grid will require extensive planning and investment to ensure grids can remain reliable. A renewables powered grid will still need baseload power sources that can provide large amounts of power reliably. But many renewable so...

The next decade will see an unprecedented level of offshore energy construction. In order to achieve the 2035 emissions targets adopted by many governments, the offshore industry will need to build thousands of turbines. Each of these must be secured by appropriate foundations and anchors, often in unmapped areas of the seabed, much deeper than those that have been used before. Achieving the pace of construction needed will strain a sector with some hard limits on its capacity. New surveying ve...

Waste is an integral part of the circular economy. It is, in many cases, simply a resource that is in the wrong place. But it can also be a nuisance, an eyesore or even a risk to health. In the UK, new regulations, and changes to ways some waste handling is allowed to take place, will both open up opportunities, and impose new liabilities. The industry still makes heavy use of paper waste transfer notices. These limit the ability of regulators to spot waste crime, and of industry participants t...

When a major public infrastructure project is announced often a brand new organisation is set up that is tasked with delivering the project. These organisations can be very small and not have the experience delivering a major project that only a few people have. In the past organisations like these have hired a programme or project manager, who takes over the delivery of the project. However this model cuts out the owner organisation from making key decisions on the project’s delivery. Now a ne...

Just over a week ago, SpaceX successfully launched one of the largest rockets ever, a key step in humanity’s journey beyond the earth. While the rocket underwent a ‘rapid unplanned disassembly’ shortly after launch, it gave the company’s engineers a wealth of data for future launches. The same company also owns the world’s largest constellation of more than 4,000 satellites, StarLink. Constellations like this have great potential. StarLink will provide internet service in the parts of the world...

The brewing industry has become a testing ground for the energy transition. Many drinkers want to drink responsibly: not just to protect their own health, but the health of the planet. Brewers large and small are taking innovative approaches to their energy use. In Samlesbury, AB InBev has started working with Protium, who will fund, build, and operate a green hydrogen facility that will provide renewable energy, heat for brewing operations, and fuel for their distribution vehicles. Hepworth &...

Britains biodiversity has been declining sharply over the last 50 years. We are now one of the most nature depleted nations in the world. Despite legislation and efforts to stem the tide of wildlife population decline, nothing has worked. Some Wildlife Trusts and organisations now support a more nature based approach to wildlife and land management. Rewilding is the process of helping nature return to its natural state and one of the best ways of doing that is by letting big animals do the job ...

Last week the UK government announced plan to ban the sale of wet wipes to deal with the problem of fatbergs in sewers. This week we’re rerunning an episode from 2019 where we venture down into the sewer system to see the largest fatberg in Europe. Underneath cities all over the UK subterranean mountains of calcified fat are gathering in our sewers as fat, oil and grease stick to baby wipes and harden to form a blubbery bacterial blockage. Removing them is dangerous, manual work, putting people...

In a world of complex supply chains, how can owners secure their assets against risks like climate change and disease lockdowns? By using the concept of resilience, owners can form strategic asset management plans, which balance the level of service required, against the cost of that service, while paying attention to all the risks faced: both by the asset itself, and by the supply chains it is part of. In this episode, Shiv Iyer and Donna Huey explore how asset management experts can help owne...

The first edition of the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors (RICS) Whole Life Carbon Assessment for the Built Environment, published in 2017, is a professional statement that establishes a methodology for calculating the carbon cost of buildings, and now infrastructure, from construction, through use, to end-of-life. The guidelines already allow users to make finely tuned carbon cost/benefit calculations. For example, do the energy savings of added insulation justify the embodied carbon c...

For 50 years the North Sea has been critical to European energy. Technology and skills developed over decades enabled the extraction of oil and gas in some of the most extreme and hazardous conditions on the planet. As the world transitions away from oil and gas, the North Sea will again be a critical source of energy. In time it will play host to thousands of wind turbines, generating unlimited clean power. The UK is targeting 50GW of offshore wind power by 2030. To realise this dream, and fu...

The Swedish city of Gothenburg is celebrating its 400 year anniversary in 2023 and as part of the celebrations the city is undergoing a construction boom. For much of the city’s 400 year history, major construction projects have been very limited by the wet and weak ground conditions beneath the city. This means that Gothenburg, unlike most comparable European cities, doesn’t have an underground metro network or any skyscrapers. But now thanks to new innovation in construction, particularly in...

In recent decades, companies have moved manufacturing to countries offering low cost labour. Today, as they aim for Net Zero, they must also consider their carbon footprint. And that is almost impossible to do if raw materials are sourced from around the world, from countries with highly emitting energy systems and poor record keeping. Sam Turner, Net Zero champion for the UK’s High Value Manufacturing Catapult, proposes a new approach: not offshoring, but ‘greenshoring’. The strategy would see...

The Engineering Matters and Reby Media team has been working on a new podcast series in partnership with HS2. How to Build a Railway is a twelve-part podcast series exploring the story behind the construction of the UK’s new high speed rail line. The podcast series features industry experts and special guests giving their unique insight on a whole range of topics including tunnelling, archaeology, ecology, architecture, building bridges, innovation, and rail systems. Each episode will focus on ...

Globally, the aviation industry accounts for 2.5% of all carbon emissions. The emission of other gases and particulates at altitude may make its warming impact even larger. Industry wide, manufactures, airlines and even airports, are all looking at how to bring in a new age of green plane technology, whether it’s hydrogen fuel cell, battery electric, or some other sustainable source of power. However, for airports, the arrival of a green plane does not mean they will have decarbonised their ow...

In light of the recent earthquakes in Turkey and Syria, this we are revisting the story of Nooraullah Kuchai. Noorullah is a civil engineer, a humanitarian and a refugee twice over. He lived in a tent in a Pakistani refugee camp for a decade and is now dedicating his life to helping people who have been displaced by war like he was. And the challenge is enormous. More people are being displaced by conflict and disaster than ever before. Today 71 million people around the world are in need of she...

What do we do after a structure fails? Often, we go to court. Courts cannot make bereaved families, or those injured, whole. They cannot repair damaged structures. But they can go some way to making right some of the harms suffered. Forensic engineers, or building pathologists, are often called on to offer expert witness testimony in these cases. James Cohen has studied many building failures. With Arup, he wrote a report that analysed the complex causes of a multiple fatality tower crane colla...

In 2019 Tarmac announced their Innovation Challenge, for companies to propose new technologies to help Tarmac decarbonise. Over the next three years in partnership with Renault Trucks and TVS Interfleet they developed the first electric concrete mixer to be used in the UK. Through the process of designing and building a first of its kind mixer, they discovered massive inefficiencies in existing diesel mixers and made a cleaner and far more efficient mixer than any diesel mixers that came before...

Robots are increasingly able to take on any repeatable task in industry, and are used in many dull, dirty or dangerous tasks. But their deployment for highly variable tasks remains limited. They are now being used in nuclear decommissioning, to sort, cut, and repack waste storage skips. And this could serve as a testing ground for their use to handle other complex and variable streams of materials. At Sellafield, one of the most complex nuclear decommissioning sites in the world, Atkins have he...