Tuesday 5 August 2014

Machinery of the day: Waterview spoil

Here’s the latest video showing the construction of the Waterview tunnel, this time highlighting the removal of spoil from the tunnel face. An almost wholly mechanised process, at the rate of one trailer truck load every ten minutes.

It reminded me of the observation that capital goods – machines and the like – all that good stuff that Thomas Piketty and his crowd think are unnecessary and irrelevant to production – are in fact tools by which human effort is vastly leveraged,, making work like this possible. (Not just more roundabout production, but production that wouldn’t be possible otherwise.)

Transport Blog has more of the tunnel story.

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