ENGLISH ROADS.

Hawera & Normanby Star, Volume XLII, Issue XLII, 29 December 1923, Page 2

ENGLISH ROADS.

i —- —• CONCRETE SURFACE LITTLE USED. 1

OPINION OF ENGLISH ENGINEER. t ___ j — HAMMERING OF LONDON STREET. j _ Remarks made by Mr T. O. Fox, district engineer to the City Corporation and recently appointed borough, engineer at Invercargill, to a Wellington i*os>t reporter in regard to roading practice in England, are of considerable interest' just now. Mr Fox recently spent 14 weeks in the Old Country, devoting practically the whole* of that time to the study <if loading metnocts in ..company with several of the leading experts of England, city and borough engineers, and experts in the. employ of big road construction com* panics, and his observations, he said, led him to the conclusion that concrete surfacing was scarcely used on heayy roads and city streets in England at all. ■ In the course of the building of a ' circular roadway which is to link-up London suburbs in such a way as will enable traffic to pass from one to the other without traversing the heart of the city streets, a considerable portion was put down in various types of concrete construction, practically every type, new and old, being experimented with, said Mr Fox, and a "statement j made by Sir 1-^, P. Maybury, chief ,angineer to the lvoads Department of the Ministry of Transport, in regard to those experimental lengths, spoke volumes in very short, space. Sir Henry Maybury was the man responsible for roading practice throughout England and Scotland, and controlled the expenditure of ten million pounds annually on construction and maintenance, so that a statement coming from him carried with it authority. That statement had been to the effect that the only interesting feature of I^e trials of con- . Crete types had bee;: to see "thei various ways in which the different sections failed under traffic." Yet that road, added Mr Fox, had been built under ideal conditions, for, being a by-pass road, it could be laid in fairly leisurely fashion, and the concrete given tkree weeks to mature before taking traffic, and, moreover, during that period of maturing the road surfacei was protected by a layer of soil kept continually moist. Side Streets. In the borough of Southwark, London, he saw one of the very few examples of concrete surfacing in England —and the only example he himself saw—for there about eight miles of that roading had been built during the last three years or so, but it was to be noted that those were side streets, carrying slower moving traffic than the mainstreets of the' borough. 'Hie borough engineer, Mr A. M. Harrison, a loading engineer of considerable repute in thei United Kingdom, and one whose opinion was respected in all parts of th« world had stated emphatically that he would not for a morrienl consider surfacing the main roads in his borough ■with anything but wood blocks or bitumen. Maintenance Law, Quits a number of English, boroughs, and also those of Lontlon itself, let their roadwork by contract to one or another of the several bis: construction firms in the country, and in a sense did not bother themselves as to the fine points of the method of construction, which would vary according to the firm which carried out the work, and most of these contractors willingly gave an undertaking to maintain the road laid down for three v .years free of charge. That alone showed that the contractors had faith in the tyr>e of road they were putting down, otherwise, they would shy clear of an undertaking that was going to run them into heavy expense, one year after another. Further, many of the companies were willing to enter into an agreement to maintain the roads for a further seven or nine years at a scheduled rate per square yard, that rate naturally varv"ig according to the volume, nature and speed of traffic. As to traffic volume, New Zealand scarcely had volume, comparatively speaking. The road stress on the Strand, London, had recently been estimated at something like 500 tons per yard width per hour, or 5000 tons per hour over a 30ft surface. That reduced to terms of vehicles, say fwlltsized lorries v.eigjking nx> at five, tons , apiece, meant one thousand UTries over the road per hour. Hutt Hosml trattic would be heavy as New Zealand traffic went, but even though the lull day s running were lumoed together in one hour no such figure as that for London streets could be set up. Wellington would have to put everything on wheeels upon that road to get anywhere near that figure, and then would not reach it.