ENGLISH LOADS

Southland Times, Issue 19100, 19 November 1923, Page 6

ENGLISH LOADS

CONCRETE SURFACING SCARCELY USED. OPINION OF ENGLAND’S LEADING ENGINEER. THE HAMMERING OF LONDON STREETS. (Special to the Times.) WELLINGTON, November 16. t Remarks! made by Mr T. O. Fox, District Engineer to the City Corporation and recently appointed Borough Engineer at Invarcargill, to a Southland Times representative this morning in regard to roading practice in England are of considerable interest just now, in view of the controversy as to what is the best surface for the Hutt road. Mr Fox recently spent fourteen weeks in the Old Country, devoting practically the whole of the time to the study of roading methods, in company with several of the leading experts of England, city and borough engineers and experts in the employ of big road construction companies and his observations, he said, led him to the conclusion that concrete’ surfacing was scarcely used at all on heavy traffic roads and city streets in England. TRIALS OF CONCRETE. 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 streets in the heart of the city, a considerable portion w r as put down in various types of concrete construction, practically every type new and old being experimented with, said Mr Fox, and a statement made by Sir H. P. Maybury, chief engineer to the Roads 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 practically throughout England and' Scotland and controlled the expenditure of £10,000,000 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 the trials of concrete types had been to see “the various ways in which the different sections failed under traffic.” Yet that road, added Mr Fox, had been build under ideal conditions, for, being a by-pass road, it could be laid in fairly leisurely fashion and the concrete given three weeks in which to mature before taking traffic and moreover during the period of maturity the road surface 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 are about eight miles of that roading had been built during the last three years dr so, but it was to b? noted that those were side streets carrying slower moving traffic than the main streets of the borough. Thfc Borough Engineer (Mr A. M. Harrison), a roading engineer of considerable repute in the United Kingdom and one whose opinion was respected in all parts of the world, had stated emphatically that he would not for a moment consider surfacing the main roads in his borough with anything but wood blocks or bitumen. MAINTENANCE LAW. Quite a number of the English boroughs, and also those of London itself, let their roadwork by contract to one or another of the several big 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 those contractors willingly give an undertaking to inaintain the road laid down for three years free of charge. That alone showed that the contractors had faith in the type of road they were putting down, otherwise they would shy clear. c r an undertaking that was going to run them into heavy expense one year after an ther. Further, many of the companiee were willing to enter an agreement to maintain the roads for a further seven or nine years at a schedule rate per square yard, that rate naturally varying according to the volume, nature and speed of the traffic.