Construction A 165 year old railway bridge in Croydon comes out over the holidays and the new deck rolls in on remote controlled transporters, but the reason no crane is allowed sits underneath the road
A main road through south London is shut to everything, including people on foot. Above it sits a wrought iron deck that has carried trains since…
Solar Power
Along 3,000 feet of concrete beside a Massachusetts interstate, a highway sound wall is set to become the first solar noise barrier in the Western Hemisphere and power 120 homes
The wall had been standing beside Interstate 95 in Lexington, Massachusetts, for years before anyone looked at it and saw a power plant. It…
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Crews are driving steel piling across 2,500 acres of western New York farmland, and the nearly 1 million panels going up there will form the largest solar farm the state has builtSEP 26 · 5 MIN
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A solar ice maker on 1 Indonesian fishing island froze nearly 390,000 pounds of fish catch in its first year, while the community ditched about 1,130 gallons of dieselSEP 25 · 5 MIN
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A solar road built into a Normandy departmental highway was rated for 280 megawatt hours a year, but measured barely half that in its first full year and kept falling afterwardSEP 23 · 5 MIN
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At a Nevada solar site, 2 battery packs caught fire and spread to the unit beside the first, while the other 112 packs came through without a markSEP 22 · 5 MIN
Wind Power
Crews shipped a crane in pieces across 500 miles of open ocean, and 3 refurbished turbines with a battery now let the Chatham Islands diesel generators shut down completely on windy days
SEP 27 · 5 MIN
Wind Power
A 49-foot blade retired from a Colorado wind farm crosses a creek in Atlanta and opens about 2 acres of park the water had kept out of reach
SEP 26 · 5 MIN
Wind Power
A 351-foot turbine blade snapped off Nantucket during its first 6 hours of testing, and inspectors traced the fault to a factory bond line rather than to the blade design
SEP 24 · 5 MIN
Wind Power
A lattice tower 984 feet tall stands in a former German lignite field, and its turbine will be winched to full height by the structure lifting itself
SEP 23 · 5 MIN
Editorial Voices
Construction
Crews boring 4 anchor chambers into karst rock beneath the world’s highest bridge hit groundwater, and instead of pumping it away they released it as a waterfall nearly 1,000 feet wide
The drill bit dropped through limestone and then hit something nobody had planned for. Karst groundwater surged into the anchor tunnel at the bridgehead…
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Crews building a 425-foot underpass beneath a Roman square uncovered a 2,000-year-old laundry with stone tanks and a mosaic floor, and the workshop was lifted clear while the job finished on timeSEP 24 · 5 MIN
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Crews digging a 26-foot stormwater basin beside the Main river in Bavaria hit massive oak beams and dry stone walls built by Celtic hands in the fourth century BCSEP 22 · 5 MIN
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Workers removed, cleaned and relaid 2 million bricks inside a disused Chelsea power station that once burned 700 metric tons of coal a day, and the riverside shell now holds 260 apartmentsSEP 21 · 5 MIN
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Steel arch spans weighing 5 million pounds each rode the Hudson River for 30 hours apiece, and crews then jacked all three of them 60 feet straight up over the HackensackSEP 13 · 5 MIN
Machinery
Built across 4 years for a single German pit, the heaviest land machine ever assembled still digs lignite while its dismantling sequence has never been made public
SEP 28 · 5 MIN
Machinery
Three smaller cranes built a ring crane at a Dutch yard, and the finished machine lifts 6,000 metric tons and places a 3,000 ton load 720 feet up
SEP 25 · 5 MIN
Machinery
Cape Hatteras lighthouse rode 2,900 feet inland on rails greased with bar soap, and restoration crews later found 116 cracks in the 16 iron brackets hidden under masonry at its top
SEP 23 · 5 MIN
Machinery
A 672 metric ton wooden church in Kiruna rolled three miles on two transporter trains held within 3 inches of level, and its bell tower followed six days later
SEP 21 · 5 MIN