Thanks again, Crystal Clear SUD and AGP for having me on site. How are you liking the construction videos? 💡 Don't forget to give Brilliant a shot at brilliant.org/PracticalEngineering
Love the videos. I work for a gas company in Florida and our contractors mainly use a Ditch Witch for our horizontal drilling. Will you ever cover the use of electronic and radar equipment to locate underground pipe? How about the use of cathodic protection and anodes to protect steel pipe from corrosion and rust?
@@stevenrod100I hope the electronic equipment has improved since I last saw it in use. The foreman was trying to find the correct iron pipe under a road and eventually told us to, Dig that bit first.
@20chocsaday I have been using an RD for a few years now and it has worked well for me. Before that it was a Vivax machine and I would always get false signals on other utilities, especially water.
Yeah, the cities and companies can use these videos as a propaganda item for citizan relationship building and keeping the community informed. And having archived footage and infromation of these items that can still be around and archived 100 years later when students study how "they did it in the OLD days", lol. Like we use the footage for documentaries from building of bridges and sky scrapers and other tunnel digging over 100 years ago from today.
You get used to it but the feeling if it is not showing up is very bad. A colleagues site blew up, shattering all windows in the village, a few years back. Still getting nervous if the drill takes a second longer than it should.
I bet it feels like that early moment in Jurassic Park where Hammond is watching the baby Velociraptor claw it’s way out of the egg in the hatchery and he is just cooing away at this newborn.
I asked a gas line guy once “how did they do that major transmission line under this river from up that mountain on the other side and know it was coming out right here?” He told me “they were within 1/10 of an inch of where they said it would come out. They’re good at what they do.”
There is a lot of footage out there. It has to be documented. Grady does a great job with footage. You can also ask your contruction and inspector friends. This stuff happens often. Most people just see barriers and traffic cones.
People in charge of the education system are too concerned about convincing kids to change jenders and pretending everyone is a viktim of wite supermacy.
As an English teacher with a class of non-English-speaking Civil Engineers, these videos are a godsend. Grady speaks clearly and grammatically about a variety of subjects, and with some preparation, my students are able to watch and understand.
I’m a Hydrovac operator, I’m glad people get to see what we do in this video. I always have to explain to people not in the industry what I do and they always seem shocked that such a thing exists.
I had no idea that such things existed; what a brilliant idea. And, as a network engineer, I'm grateful for what you do. (One of my greatest enemies is the backhoe.)
So tell me - why not using a horizontal hydrovac to bore the entire track? A slightly modified one of course. Sounds less risky if it wouldn’t hurt any supply lines.
OOH! Practical Construction AND Railroads?! Sweet. As always with your videos, I learned answers to questions I would never even have imagined. Also, even though I'm 63, big machines are always a pleasure to watch. It brings me back to when I was a small kid in the 1960s and Interstate 94 was slammed through the part of St. Paul where I lived. The corridor for the freeway ran parallel to the street I lived on and was only 4 blocks from my house. My many brothers and I spent loads of time watching the coordinated process over two years. (We were excited and fascinated, and of course were unaware of the controversy about building these blocks-wide barriers right through the poorest neighborhoods of cities across the whole country.) A few years later, Richard Scarry's 'Cars and Trucks and Things That Go' came out, and even though I was a bit old for it (I was nine at the time), I loved reading it to the boys I babysat on the other side of my block, and still loved it decades later when I'd read it with my own boy. Your videos give me the same sense of wonder -- and fun! -- at the design, engineering, and building of large things. And your camera work on these construction projects, from wide shots with a drone to cameras dropping into water-dug pits, is fantastic!
It is a great video indeed. There is a lot of high quality educational content on RUclips these days! You can't know and learn everything, but whatever you're wondering about, there is a good video about it on here more often than not these days. I have a hard time stopping myself from watching more and more to find out how everything works, haha But it still needs to be fun, and I need my sleep.
@@tylerjae0622Well, thanks. ☺It was getting a bit long, so I left out that my son was the perfect age to watch 'Bob, the Builder' when it first came on, and that he's now a year away from completing his electrical engineering degree.
As someone who manages the design of projects exactly like this for railroads across the country, I can say that this video is packed with a ton of information. This was such a good example to use to highlight all the considerations, systems, and techniques that make up a construction project like this.
I used to do this for a living and you did a good job of covering all of the tasks involved without over or under explaining it. Keep up the high quality videos.
I work at a power plant that used to be coal fired but switched to natural gas. Getting the pipe line there was amazing. It had to go under a subyard, under a river, up through a side of a mountain & pop up in a field a long way off. The drill bit came out within 1 ft of where they planned. I was amazed how they were able to do that! I get worried when I have to drill through a wall hoping I come out on the other side in the right spot.
The importance of coordination between construction workers and railroad operators can not be overstated. Last April in the Netherlands, a freight train and intercity crashed into a crane that was inexplicably crossing the tracks, killing the crane operator and injuring thirty people
7:58 Particularly, I'd like some details about using a GNSS base station to process total station data... In all seriousness, these videos are great to see the big picture of those projects we show up to and either stake a few points or take a few shots, then leave to the next job. I definitely look forward to future content both about surveying and just in general from Grady.
After getting my “Practical” fix, I have to admit I used to ask why there are so many people on sites like this. Not after Grady’s last bunch of videos. Thanks to you Grady and Crystal Clear for making this happen
Those vacuum excavators are very cool. Last year we had a utility pole come down and need to be replaced. The ellectric company used a vacuum excavator to dig the hole for the new pole. Super fast and extremely tidy!
@@pizzaivlifei never operated it full time but I've done a lot of hours on a trailer vac. I never got used to the noise lol. We had to do some painfully large jobs with it as well excavating 5m each side of an essential fibre cable in the middle of the desert in Australia. It was so essential to running a gas plant and would have been a nightmare to replace so they were happier to pay for us to do that for two weeks rather than for a one hour excavator job. Oh and it was also 50C (122F) and we had to wear sperm suits for, you know, safety.
@@pizzaivlife ours are pretty quiet compared to the old ones. They are making strides in getting them quieter. Man some of them not tolerable tho. Even with ear pro.
I used to work outside at a gas station, and I think monthly a vac truck would come do some type of maintenance on the property. That was one of the most hated parts of being there ever. Those vac trucks are crazy loud, but I think it has to do with whatever sound they are making, not so much the sound level.
12:15 looks like some workers signed the water pipe before inserting. That's cute :) It's a fun thought, thinking that below earth, there are tons of signatures from workers installing critical infrastructure ^_^
@@sharp14x it's like the signatures of carpenters hidden in the rafters of cathedrals. Their quiet shout into the world that "I exist!". And you can know that it's a tradition in the crew. Make sure to get everyone to sign, new guy gets a cheer and a clap on the back for his first signature.
I once saw "Dave and Lisa did it in this pipe" painted on the inside of a 48" storm sewer during an inspection. That's what I call a cheap date night.😂
In my youth I did a lot of this for AT&T pushing pipe with a pneumatic driver. Rail roads were very controlled jobs. Thanks for bringing back the memories.
lol that’s funny seeing as you push the drill and then pull the pipe through. And a horizontal boring machine is not pneumatic, it’s hydraulic. Not sure what you were doing. 👌
"pushing pipe with a pneumatic driver" You may know it as an air hammer, but the one we used was a 200 lb air hammer made for pushing pipe. It could be used as a underground torpedo on short runs with the cable tied to the braided steel air line. Think oversized jackhammer, vid of a small one ruclips.net/video/3PGp34eueXQ/видео.html
On the surface it looks like something I would have driven by and not thought twice about. It's amazing how many moving parts and details there are on a seemingly "simple" project. Thanks for taking time to document and make this video. I bet it wasn't easy to get all those shots *and* stay out of the way.
Awesome of them to reach out to you for coverage! The fact they wanted their work to be documented by you shows not only that they trust you, but that they're proud of their crew as well. Great stuff.
At first I wondered if it wouldn't be simpler, and thus cheaper, to just build the pipes up and over the tracks, but seeing the machine in action, I don't think you could get much simpler. It's an incredibly elegant way to run a pipe under something.
Something to consider about building over a railroad. Is what is the current max height of the line. If there are already tunnels or bridges on the line limiting train height then you just have to build something higher than those tunnels or bridges. But if there are no limits then you'll have to convince the railroad that you can build high enough to allow any legal height of train.
One thing to keep in mind atleast here in Finland is that the temperature sometimes can be near -40 degrees. Texas too, has a problem with freezing temperatures sometimes.
This was really cool to see. I had a crew install a new sewer pipe through the CBD, under busy intersections, and they were in front of my house for months (only 8 hours per day though). They also had to bore a bit further than this. Me, an engineer, thought they couldn't possibly take 7 weeks to install the pipe. But watching this I realise 7 weeks of 8 hours per day, 6 days per week to go 300m was probably really good timing. Also, yes, I snuck into the site each night to check it out and when it was finished I crawled through the entire length of pipe (before it was commissioned).
Would be cool to see video on how Texas put huge pipeline from two lakes in east Texas to Dallas Fort Worth area. Pipes were so big you could drive a car in them
As a Surveyor I loved the shout out to our profession at the end. I really enjoy my work. It provides alot of the advantages of being a tradesman or engineer without the downsides of either of those professions.
I live a few hundred feet from a river. A few years ago the gas company needed to run a new pipe under the river. There was a boring rig on the other side in an industrial area and the terminal end was on my street. They fed the pipe from the other side of the river but also push/pulled through a hole in the street right by my house (made it hard to use my driveway at first but they worked around that issue). Fascinating to watch.
I once worked for a contractor that built railroad crossings, and I remember the complaints about a job along a very busy rail line where the contract didn't allow them to disrupt service in any way, so they had to stop work every 15 minutes or so to let a train go by.
Being invited to these different sites is such a cool experience. Keep up the great work. As an aeronautical engineer, seeing civil engineering is certainly interesting!
But how? From the boom operator wracking the line with the vacuum aperture, or some other mishandling of the process? Or are the pipes so close to failure that the pressure washer finishes them?
@@LetsTalkAboutPrepping When set to tight focus and at point blank range pressure washers cut through plastics pretty fast. So I'd guess operator error.
The damage I’ve seen is from operators smashing the boom down on plastic pipes, too high of pressure, and letting large chunks of dirt slam down onto fitting. I’ll admit, I hit a saddle on a 1 inch service with a chunk of falling dirt accidentally. Thankfully it had already failed and was being dug up for repair but I didn’t help it any 😬
My pops started his own hydrovac business in Phoenix back in the early 1980s (Western Hydrovac) and I remember him telling me how much water pressure ran through the jet rodder; enough to sever a limb easily
I work civil every day, but still love to come home and watch one of your videos. On site Surveyour. Learned on the job. 13 years of Carpentry experience prior, I became our companies lead surveyour after less than 3 years.
They did this next to my house to install sewer line under tracks. I looked down the hole one night but didn't get to watch it work. Only saw the tracks laying in the hole. Thanks for showing this. I was very curious about how it worked.
Every time I pass a machine that runs the pipeline underground, I think to myself, "I wonder how those work? I should look that up!" ...And eventually forget lol! Thanks for the video!
Wow very cool, I used to live in that immediate area. I drove that road daily for many years and still have family that live there. In fact I can just make out their house in some of the clips; I’ll have to send this to them. There is a nearby quarry which is the reason for all of the gravel haulers. The percussive hits of their tires on the concrete railroad crossings cause the crossings to breakdown over time and they have to have to replace them at least once or twice a year. The trips across them become fairly jarring once they start breaking down, especially if you have a car. And since there are two crossings next to each other, you get twice the punishment. Interestingly enough, the damage is always on the side of the roadway that leads away from the quarry due to the weight of the trucks. Thanks for posting this!
Thanks, Grady, for doing these construction videos. As an old electrical engineer, I am fascinated by the practical application of civil engineering. And I'll agree with the contractor; sometimes the old school ways are the way to go.
Thank you for all you doing. Encouraging people to become engineers/technicians is very important, and showing this stuff is super interesting for everyone.
I work with a civil engineering and GIS company and deal with railroads and permitting all the time. I love seeing how this works in the field! Thanks for the video!
I always have a bone to pick when I feel like we are “just getting a new water line!” After having to deal with construction. But water is important I get it…. 😉 This process really is fascinating!
Wow, that double railroad crossing featured in the thumbnail and the video is actually one that I go to in order to watch trains on an almost weekly basis, and have been doing so for many years! That was quite unexpected, haha. For any wondering, it’s Watson Lane West in New Braunfels, TX. Pretty cool! I’ve watched and filmed trains at all the places that those train videos for the video were recorded from.
@@icebird76 Thx, man. My mistake. Grady introduces himself simply by voice twice in every video. Not written clearly for longer time. Grady does lift up my day. 😃😎
First of all, I love these Practical Construction videos. Second of all, my brother is a surveyor. This makes total sense considering that he is a whiz at math.
I worked on a crew running underground power in the 70s. Boring companies existed but we didnt use them unless needed. We had 5 foot sections of strong pipe that we screwed together as we pushed further in with a backhoe. I was the guy lining up the pipe and assembling it. Then we screwed a reamer on the far end and pulled it back through to expand the hole. Sometimes several times with progressively larger reamers. Had to run under the CN main line. We kept hitting timbers. Had to dig a hole for the tractor to sit low enough to go deep enough. Another spot on the same run was such a hard pull we had to chain the winch truck to the tractor and the trencher with blocks behind the wheels and used a 3 part line with half inch cable and anapped that. That job took a week. Ah the good old days.
I was really surprised that it took a week to get the job done, especially considering that they were working 24 a day. Props to you for being invited to watch them and make this video
More about surveying and surveyors, this job is so underrated and misunderstood by everyone, i always love it when other people talk about surveying, it gives my job a purpose instead of being pessimistic about it as always
As soon as I saw the title I absolutely had to watch it, because I have crews in front of my house doing this exact task, with railway lines replaced with suburban roads. Although they first have to remove existing pipelines encased in concrete before they can put in the new ones.
This video was fantastic. I'm a network engineer and I've had a couple projects delayed while the contractor laying fiber had to negotiate a railroad crossing (and deal with a gas company that failed to locate their lines along the railroad after days of potholing in the Arizona summer...) and I've always been curious about what some of the extra steps look like.
Another great video with insight to railroad procedures and processes! I am lightly involved in these types of projects several times a year... gotta mark the signal cables, and have personnel there if "daylighting" is required before the jack and bore! Thanks for your efforts, another winner.
We used to do that in half the time in the Houston area using water boring. The only problem with that is that if a train comes over the tracks before the casing is installed, it can collapse the bore hole and you have to start all over in a different location!
Videos like this remind us how much more efficient construction projects are today than in the past. It’s easy to look at some road work and think ‘when will they finish?’ But it really doesn’t compare to projects in the past.
As a civil engineer student these video are great for showing the whole process of practical engineering, out on site in the trenches. It’s a break from lectures and study to remind myself where I want to end up.
Go watch construction whenever you get a chance. Talk to the crew if you can and ask questions. I worked on a survey crew during the summers when I was a student and that was a great experience. Good luck on your career!
This is great. So often I watch projects like this trying to figure out exactly what they're up to. It was only relatively recently I discovered what those vacuum trucks are, after seeing them with increasing regularity on the roads for years. What a great invention.
Very cool to see this video, I recognized the location in the spoiler you placed in an earlier video. I'm a geologist that works at a nearby quarry; close enough to this project that the Crystal Clear SUD wells for this pipeline are on our property. I drove by this site many times during the process, and it's nice to see what was going on down in the excavations. Thanks for the great video!
I just learned about vacuum excavating recently. They are installing fiberoptic cables in my neighborhood, and there are vacuum excavators all over the place, digging holes for the new cables while trying to avoid all of the other existing stuff: phone cables; electrical cables; gas lines; water lines; TV cable lines; sewer lines; etc., etc., etc. It took me a few minutes to figure out what was going on, but I realized that it was a genius idea; quick, precise and clean excavation with very little risk of damaging anything. Once they are done, they come back with a slinger truck to fill the hole with soil. They use directional drilling to run the cable horizontally, then dig vertical holes to join them up. For weeks, the neighborhood has been full with marking crews, directional drilling machinery, and vacuum excavators. It's not too inconvenient, and it's nice that a construction geek like me can observe an infrastructure project that has literally come to my front door.
One of the coolest things to me is that we can point at a mountain, say "I want the road to go through THAT", and we have a machine that not only drills the path but also installs the walls and sealant and ventilation etc slots as it goes. I play a lot of fantasy games, and I like to imagine blowing a dwarf's mind by showing them how we dig. :D The things we can do with our technology are absolutely fantastic, and they're mundane enough that we don't really know about a lot of them. Thank you for videos like this one that show the process!
Watching how our world as we know it comes together is so intriguing to me and I am so thankful for people like you Grady, to allow me to watch this and become a part of it. Hope you have a great week!
LOVE these videos! Especially appreciate the more detailed series, like the sewage pump station. I hope more companies approach you when doing these projects!
I know this series may not get as many views and/or be treated as favorably by the RUclips algorithm, as some of your other stuff, but I hope that y'all still produce videos for this series! Practical construction has been very eye opening for me!
Yeaaa, a video about horizontal boring - always fascinating and it's almost all that's used here in the Arizona valley now-a-days because of the density of the place here now!
Really happy to see this video. I poured concrete for a job going under the rails and the contractor mentioned a different company would finish that portion. The work was electrical, but imagine some same work methods are used.
Grady- fascinating, as always. I live in the Tampa/St. Pete area and watched a crew push a new water line (with sections assembled) and pushed under the Intracoastal Waterway to the barrier island in Pinellas County. Your video helps me understand how this could possibly be accomplished. The engineering seems incredibly daunting. Big fan of your Practical Engineering and, now, Construction. Thanks Grady- you continue to make the complexities of our world understandable.
Learned the term potholing! Watched it done in my neighborhood a few weeks ago as a local fiber company is boring and installing fiber. They potholed around each water meter to avoid water lines since their proposed alignment came pretty close to existing lines. They did similar measurements around known gas/electric infrastructure, then painted their depths on the pavement nearby before starting the drilling operation. Very cool, and the backfill afterward made it look as if they were never there.
Maybe one of the most interesting new series from established youtubers; I don't know of anyone that combines both in-depth technical knowledge with on-site filming in such a compelling way. Hope you get many more partnerships in the future!
I'm a drafter for a civil engineering company and I have a project that has drilling for water main and sanitary sewer under a railroad line so it was cool to see this perspective because I'm usually always in the office and don't get too see it built
Thanks again, Crystal Clear SUD and AGP for having me on site. How are you liking the construction videos?
💡 Don't forget to give Brilliant a shot at brilliant.org/PracticalEngineering
Ok
Love the videos. I work for a gas company in Florida and our contractors mainly use a Ditch Witch for our horizontal drilling. Will you ever cover the use of electronic and radar equipment to locate underground pipe? How about the use of cathodic protection and anodes to protect steel pipe from corrosion and rust?
It reminded me of my travel to work in 1970, but the pipe was huge. Car sized to take water to part of a city.
@@stevenrod100I hope the electronic equipment has improved since I last saw it in use.
The foreman was trying to find the correct iron pipe under a road and eventually told us to, Dig that bit first.
@20chocsaday I have been using an RD for a few years now and it has worked well for me. Before that it was a Vivax machine and I would always get false signals on other utilities, especially water.
I love the fact that you have achieved enough recognition that companies are coming to you for you to cover their project.
And i hope that they keep doing that, been loving these vids, gets you an idea what these workmen you see often enough are doing
In all reality , thats prolly not the case
It must feel good to be invited to cover projects like these.
Yeah, the cities and companies can use these videos as a propaganda item for citizan relationship building and keeping the community informed. And having archived footage and infromation of these items that can still be around and archived 100 years later when students study how "they did it in the OLD days", lol. Like we use the footage for documentaries from building of bridges and sky scrapers and other tunnel digging over 100 years ago from today.
A collab with a company & another channel like The B1M would be amazing!
5:26 "Horizontal Earth boring is relatively straight forward" 😂
And exciting.
@@Bradamsmx5 but, before the earth gets bored...
@@Bradamsmx5no it's boring..
Also worth pointing out: vertical earth boring is relatively straight up. Lol
@@marcberm straight up to China
"Of course every contractor knows as soon as he starts making good progress it's gonna rain!"
Truer words have never been spoken... 🤔
As they say, Murphy was an optimist.
So, clearly contractors should rent themselves to farmers as rainmakers....
Working for an underground contractor in South Florida you plan dewatering from the bid if you plan on benching below 5’.
Watching that drill come out exactly where it’s supposed to has to be an incredible feeling for everyone working there!
You get used to it but the feeling if it is not showing up is very bad. A colleagues site blew up, shattering all windows in the village, a few years back. Still getting nervous if the drill takes a second longer than it should.
i think the people who built the channel tunnel were more relieved 😅
I bet it feels like that early moment in Jurassic Park where Hammond is watching the baby Velociraptor claw it’s way out of the egg in the hatchery and he is just cooing away at this newborn.
I asked a gas line guy once “how did they do that major transmission line under this river from up that mountain on the other side and know it was coming out right here?”
He told me “they were within 1/10 of an inch of where they said it would come out. They’re good at what they do.”
"It was supposed to come out in Texas."
I hope more contractors reach out to you to have you do these types of videos. This is the type of stuff missing from our modern education system.
There is a lot of footage out there. It has to be documented. Grady does a great job with footage. You can also ask your contruction and inspector friends. This stuff happens often. Most people just see barriers and traffic cones.
@@ahoksbergen taking footage is easy. Organizing and condensing it in to a coherent video is a skill
People in charge of the education system are too concerned about convincing kids to change jenders and pretending everyone is a viktim of wite supermacy.
People in charge of that care more about indoctinating jendre changes and wite supermacy.
As an English teacher with a class of non-English-speaking Civil Engineers, these videos are a godsend. Grady speaks clearly and grammatically about a variety of subjects, and with some preparation, my students are able to watch and understand.
I’m a Hydrovac operator, I’m glad people get to see what we do in this video. I always have to explain to people not in the industry what I do and they always seem shocked that such a thing exists.
I had no idea that such things existed; what a brilliant idea. And, as a network engineer, I'm grateful for what you do. (One of my greatest enemies is the backhoe.)
It was news to me watching this 🙂 Cool machine
So tell me - why not using a horizontal hydrovac to bore the entire track? A slightly modified one of course. Sounds less risky if it wouldn’t hurt any supply lines.
Hey Mate, great Job ! Best regardes from a HDD Rig operator =)
I've seen the pnuematic ones, but this was even cooler!
OOH! Practical Construction AND Railroads?! Sweet. As always with your videos, I learned answers to questions I would never even have imagined.
Also, even though I'm 63, big machines are always a pleasure to watch. It brings me back to when I was a small kid in the 1960s and Interstate 94 was slammed through the part of St. Paul where I lived. The corridor for the freeway ran parallel to the street I lived on and was only 4 blocks from my house. My many brothers and I spent loads of time watching the coordinated process over two years. (We were excited and fascinated, and of course were unaware of the controversy about building these blocks-wide barriers right through the poorest neighborhoods of cities across the whole country.)
A few years later, Richard Scarry's 'Cars and Trucks and Things That Go' came out, and even though I was a bit old for it (I was nine at the time), I loved reading it to the boys I babysat on the other side of my block, and still loved it decades later when I'd read it with my own boy. Your videos give me the same sense of wonder -- and fun! -- at the design, engineering, and building of large things. And your camera work on these construction projects, from wide shots with a drone to cameras dropping into water-dug pits, is fantastic!
Freeway construction really is so impressive. Especially when you are a child and don't have to think of the consequences lol
It is a great video indeed. There is a lot of high quality educational content on RUclips these days!
You can't know and learn everything, but whatever you're wondering about, there is a good video about it on here more often than not these days.
I have a hard time stopping myself from watching more and more to find out how everything works, haha
But it still needs to be fun, and I need my sleep.
@@woutervanr Those could be exact words said by me!
This is beautiful. Thank you.
@@tylerjae0622Well, thanks. ☺It was getting a bit long, so I left out that my son was the perfect age to watch 'Bob, the Builder' when it first came on, and that he's now a year away from completing his electrical engineering degree.
As someone who manages the design of projects exactly like this for railroads across the country, I can say that this video is packed with a ton of information. This was such a good example to use to highlight all the considerations, systems, and techniques that make up a construction project like this.
I never had a clue how any of this was done before seeing this video. It made me aware of the tons of pipes and other infrastructure beneath my feet.
It's a good day when you get a new Practical Engineering video
I stopped my job being an engineer to watch this video
Nah, it's Practical Construction (1:27)
I used to do this for a living and you did a good job of covering all of the tasks involved without over or under explaining it. Keep up the high quality videos.
I work at a power plant that used to be coal fired but switched to natural gas. Getting the pipe line there was amazing. It had to go under a subyard, under a river, up through a side of a mountain & pop up in a field a long way off. The drill bit came out within 1 ft of where they planned. I was amazed how they were able to do that! I get worried when I have to drill through a wall hoping I come out on the other side in the right spot.
The importance of coordination between construction workers and railroad operators can not be overstated. Last April in the Netherlands, a freight train and intercity crashed into a crane that was inexplicably crossing the tracks, killing the crane operator and injuring thirty people
As a surveyor, I’d love to see more videos promoting such a technological profession
I second that
7:58 Particularly, I'd like some details about using a GNSS base station to process total station data...
In all seriousness, these videos are great to see the big picture of those projects we show up to and either stake a few points or take a few shots, then leave to the next job.
I definitely look forward to future content both about surveying and just in general from Grady.
As a dirt lawyer, I’d love to watch some videos about surveying.
Also a surveyor, also think people need to know more about it!
As an abject non-surveyor, I would ***LOVE*** to see videos that explain surveying!!! Please, oh please, oh please! 🙂
After getting my “Practical” fix, I have to admit I used to ask why there are so many people on sites like this. Not after Grady’s last bunch of videos. Thanks to you Grady and Crystal Clear for making this happen
I'm always excited to watch a boring video from Practical Engineering!
Those vacuum excavators are very cool. Last year we had a utility pole come down and need to be replaced. The ellectric company used a vacuum excavator to dig the hole for the new pole. Super fast and extremely tidy!
they are wonderful but oh boy is that sound annoying. I imagine their crews must get used to it though
@@pizzaivlifei never operated it full time but I've done a lot of hours on a trailer vac. I never got used to the noise lol. We had to do some painfully large jobs with it as well excavating 5m each side of an essential fibre cable in the middle of the desert in Australia. It was so essential to running a gas plant and would have been a nightmare to replace so they were happier to pay for us to do that for two weeks rather than for a one hour excavator job.
Oh and it was also 50C (122F) and we had to wear sperm suits for, you know, safety.
@@pizzaivlife ours are pretty quiet compared to the old ones. They are making strides in getting them quieter. Man some of them not tolerable tho. Even with ear pro.
The real noise is generated when vactoring in gravelly soils. I been on gun ranges that were quieter.😅@@jcprov9481
I used to work outside at a gas station, and I think monthly a vac truck would come do some type of maintenance on the property. That was one of the most hated parts of being there ever. Those vac trucks are crazy loud, but I think it has to do with whatever sound they are making, not so much the sound level.
12:15 looks like some workers signed the water pipe before inserting. That's cute :) It's a fun thought, thinking that below earth, there are tons of signatures from workers installing critical infrastructure ^_^
It's great that they feel both confident and have enough pride in their work to do that!
@@sharp14x it's like the signatures of carpenters hidden in the rafters of cathedrals. Their quiet shout into the world that "I exist!".
And you can know that it's a tradition in the crew. Make sure to get everyone to sign, new guy gets a cheer and a clap on the back for his first signature.
I once saw "Dave and Lisa did it in this pipe" painted on the inside of a 48" storm sewer during an inspection. That's what I call a cheap date night.😂
@@circularrobert That's what makes us human, we all want to shout "I exist! I did something" and that's my favourite thing about humanity.
In my youth I did a lot of this for AT&T pushing pipe with a pneumatic driver. Rail roads were very controlled jobs. Thanks for bringing back the memories.
lol that’s funny seeing as you push the drill and then pull the pipe through.
And a horizontal boring machine is not pneumatic, it’s hydraulic.
Not sure what you were doing. 👌
"pushing pipe with a pneumatic driver" You may know it as an air hammer, but the one we used was a 200 lb air hammer made for pushing pipe. It could be used as a underground torpedo on short runs with the cable tied to the braided steel air line. Think oversized jackhammer, vid of a small one ruclips.net/video/3PGp34eueXQ/видео.html
@@karryhardman8735 uh dude that sucks bad…. May as well be a coal miner.
Got any hearing left? Back issues?
I'm so happy that this series is continuing. It's absolutely fascinating.
On the surface it looks like something I would have driven by and not thought twice about.
It's amazing how many moving parts and details there are on a seemingly "simple" project.
Thanks for taking time to document and make this video. I bet it wasn't easy to get all those shots *and* stay out of the way.
I know right! Things we take for granted daily, until it stops working
I am a surveyor from Ukraine, currently working for a company from San Francisco. Very interesting video!
Awesome of them to reach out to you for coverage! The fact they wanted their work to be documented by you shows not only that they trust you, but that they're proud of their crew as well. Great stuff.
Plus it's free advertising
I hope Grady does one video for each possible type of infrastructure intersection
At first I wondered if it wouldn't be simpler, and thus cheaper, to just build the pipes up and over the tracks, but seeing the machine in action, I don't think you could get much simpler. It's an incredibly elegant way to run a pipe under something.
Something to consider about building over a railroad. Is what is the current max height of the line. If there are already tunnels or bridges on the line limiting train height then you just have to build something higher than those tunnels or bridges. But if there are no limits then you'll have to convince the railroad that you can build high enough to allow any legal height of train.
One thing to keep in mind atleast here in Finland is that the temperature sometimes can be near -40 degrees. Texas too, has a problem with freezing temperatures sometimes.
This was really cool to see. I had a crew install a new sewer pipe through the CBD, under busy intersections, and they were in front of my house for months (only 8 hours per day though). They also had to bore a bit further than this. Me, an engineer, thought they couldn't possibly take 7 weeks to install the pipe. But watching this I realise 7 weeks of 8 hours per day, 6 days per week to go 300m was probably really good timing. Also, yes, I snuck into the site each night to check it out and when it was finished I crawled through the entire length of pipe (before it was commissioned).
Would be cool to see video on how Texas put huge pipeline from two lakes in east Texas to Dallas Fort Worth area. Pipes were so big you could drive a car in them
As a Nassco operator, and vactor operator, its amazing to see you coving this stuff
As a Surveyor I loved the shout out to our profession at the end. I really enjoy my work. It provides alot of the advantages of being a tradesman or engineer without the downsides of either of those professions.
I live a few hundred feet from a river. A few years ago the gas company needed to run a new pipe under the river. There was a boring rig on the other side in an industrial area and the terminal end was on my street. They fed the pipe from the other side of the river but also push/pulled through a hole in the street right by my house (made it hard to use my driveway at first but they worked around that issue).
Fascinating to watch.
I once worked for a contractor that built railroad crossings, and I remember the complaints about a job along a very busy rail line where the contract didn't allow them to disrupt service in any way, so they had to stop work every 15 minutes or so to let a train go by.
Being invited to these different sites is such a cool experience. Keep up the great work. As an aeronautical engineer, seeing civil engineering is certainly interesting!
Another great video. Thanks for sharing what great work Engineers do.
one of if not the best channels on youtube. i like a few other channels for their mindless content, but this one makes you think, and is fun to watch.
I work in drinking water in Austin so I love seeing you do a video on a topic I am familiar with. Thank you for all the great information you share!
Utility Locator here, HVAC can definitely damage underground utilities. I’ve run on multiple emergencies where HVAC cut gas services
But how? From the boom operator wracking the line with the vacuum aperture, or some other mishandling of the process? Or are the pipes so close to failure that the pressure washer finishes them?
@@LetsTalkAboutPrepping When set to tight focus and at point blank range pressure washers cut through plastics pretty fast. So I'd guess operator error.
The damage I’ve seen is from operators smashing the boom down on plastic pipes, too high of pressure, and letting large chunks of dirt slam down onto fitting. I’ll admit, I hit a saddle on a 1 inch service with a chunk of falling dirt accidentally. Thankfully it had already failed and was being dug up for repair but I didn’t help it any 😬
My pops started his own hydrovac business in Phoenix back in the early 1980s (Western Hydrovac) and I remember him telling me how much water pressure ran through the jet rodder; enough to sever a limb easily
@@LetsTalkAboutPrepping Mostly high pressure and just carelessness but I’ve heard of rocks gashing a hole into it as well
I'm 57 yo I have worked and still am for UPS for 37 years. I love the challenge of logistics. I wish I could start a new career in infrastructure.
Perfect timing! I was leaning on my shovel wondering how to get water over to the other field. Thanks for the plan and a shopping list.
One of my favorite things to watch last summer and the summer before during my internship. The crews were also great to talk to and learn from.
This machine is fascinating, not boring
😂
It's both!
I work civil every day, but still love to come home and watch one of your videos.
On site Surveyour. Learned on the job. 13 years of Carpentry experience prior, I became our companies lead surveyour after less than 3 years.
They did this next to my house to install sewer line under tracks. I looked down the hole one night but didn't get to watch it work. Only saw the tracks laying in the hole. Thanks for showing this. I was very curious about how it worked.
Every time I pass a machine that runs the pipeline underground, I think to myself, "I wonder how those work? I should look that up!"
...And eventually forget lol! Thanks for the video!
Wow very cool, I used to live in that immediate area. I drove that road daily for many years and still have family that live there. In fact I can just make out their house in some of the clips; I’ll have to send this to them.
There is a nearby quarry which is the reason for all of the gravel haulers. The percussive hits of their tires on the concrete railroad crossings cause the crossings to breakdown over time and they have to have to replace them at least once or twice a year. The trips across them become fairly jarring once they start breaking down, especially if you have a car. And since there are two crossings next to each other, you get twice the punishment. Interestingly enough, the damage is always on the side of the roadway that leads away from the quarry due to the weight of the trucks.
Thanks for posting this!
the puns hurt my soul. Please more
How cool that they let you film the work in process.
Thanks, Grady, for doing these construction videos. As an old electrical engineer, I am fascinated by the practical application of civil engineering. And I'll agree with the contractor; sometimes the old school ways are the way to go.
Thank you for all you doing.
Encouraging people to become engineers/technicians is very important, and showing this stuff is super interesting for everyone.
We really enjoyed watching this one on Nebula a few weeks ago!
I work with a civil engineering and GIS company and deal with railroads and permitting all the time. I love seeing how this works in the field! Thanks for the video!
I always have a bone to pick when I feel like we are “just getting a new water line!” After having to deal with construction. But water is important I get it…. 😉
This process really is fascinating!
Wow, that double railroad crossing featured in the thumbnail and the video is actually one that I go to in order to watch trains on an almost weekly basis, and have been doing so for many years! That was quite unexpected, haha. For any wondering, it’s Watson Lane West in New Braunfels, TX. Pretty cool! I’ve watched and filmed trains at all the places that those train videos for the video were recorded from.
5:25 "In practice, horizontal earth boring is relatively straightforward." Brady, you crack me up! 😀
(Uups, correction: Grady)
In a similar topic of elevation, his name is Grady, not Brady.
@@icebird76 Thx, man. My mistake. Grady introduces himself simply by voice twice in every video. Not written clearly for longer time. Grady does lift up my day. 😃😎
Finally! I've been looking for a getting a pipeline under a railroad tutorial for AGES.
First of all, I love these Practical Construction videos.
Second of all, my brother is a surveyor. This makes total sense considering that he is a whiz at math.
That pot-holing technique is brilliant!
NEED WAAAAY MORE OF THIS! Thank you Grady!!!
I love this channel. My favourite channel on RUclips right now.
"horizontal earth boring is relatively straight-forward" Grooooan lol
I worked on a crew running underground power in the 70s. Boring companies existed but we didnt use them unless needed. We had 5 foot sections of strong pipe that we screwed together as we pushed further in with a backhoe. I was the guy lining up the pipe and assembling it. Then we screwed a reamer on the far end and pulled it back through to expand the hole. Sometimes several times with progressively larger reamers. Had to run under the CN main line. We kept hitting timbers. Had to dig a hole for the tractor to sit low enough to go deep enough. Another spot on the same run was such a hard pull we had to chain the winch truck to the tractor and the trencher with blocks behind the wheels and used a 3 part line with half inch cable and anapped that. That job took a week. Ah the good old days.
The topic of this video is... boring 😎
Poor joke
There were only 9 likes in a whole month. lol, this was a really bad joke
I was really surprised that it took a week to get the job done, especially considering that they were working 24 a day. Props to you for being invited to watch them and make this video
Debate about it and evaluate the project 11 times until abandoning it 15 yrs after
You have a bright long career ahead of you in public works
More about surveying and surveyors, this job is so underrated and misunderstood by everyone, i always love it when other people talk about surveying, it gives my job a purpose instead of being pessimistic about it as always
👍
Fascinating! We take water supply for granted, modern civilisation built on the shoulders of those who have come before us. Thank you!
This is a pretty...boring... Video
Because you is not old enough to understand
I've dealt with this as well, as a pipeline engineer in California. Thanks for explaining this to everyone!
As soon as I saw the title I absolutely had to watch it, because I have crews in front of my house doing this exact task, with railway lines replaced with suburban roads. Although they first have to remove existing pipelines encased in concrete before they can put in the new ones.
To Grady, From a Brady: This practical engineering series is BEYOND top notch... please continue with these kinds of series down the road. Love it!
I'm absolutely LOVING this series. It's so cool to have you on site!
Vacuum excavation is one of the best ideas since sliced bread. Saves us thousands. Great video
Grady: love your work. My dad was a civil engineer for the state of New York. He got started as a battlefield engineer in WWII.
This video was fantastic. I'm a network engineer and I've had a couple projects delayed while the contractor laying fiber had to negotiate a railroad crossing (and deal with a gas company that failed to locate their lines along the railroad after days of potholing in the Arizona summer...) and I've always been curious about what some of the extra steps look like.
Another great video with insight to railroad procedures and processes! I am lightly involved in these types of projects several times a year... gotta mark the signal cables, and have personnel there if "daylighting" is required before the jack and bore! Thanks for your efforts, another winner.
Please keep practical construction going! There's no other Chanel like it!
Grady, this is the most boring video you have ever made and I love it!
We used to do that in half the time in the Houston area using water boring. The only problem with that is that if a train comes over the tracks before the casing is installed, it can collapse the bore hole and you have to start all over in a different location!
Videos like this remind us how much more efficient construction projects are today than in the past. It’s easy to look at some road work and think ‘when will they finish?’ But it really doesn’t compare to projects in the past.
That transition to the sponsor was seamless and meaningful!! Awesome video!
As a civil engineer student these video are great for showing the whole process of practical engineering, out on site in the trenches. It’s a break from lectures and study to remind myself where I want to end up.
Go watch construction whenever you get a chance. Talk to the crew if you can and ask questions. I worked on a survey crew during the summers when I was a student and that was a great experience. Good luck on your career!
This is great. So often I watch projects like this trying to figure out exactly what they're up to. It was only relatively recently I discovered what those vacuum trucks are, after seeing them with increasing regularity on the roads for years. What a great invention.
Very cool to see this video, I recognized the location in the spoiler you placed in an earlier video. I'm a geologist that works at a nearby quarry; close enough to this project that the Crystal Clear SUD wells for this pipeline are on our property. I drove by this site many times during the process, and it's nice to see what was going on down in the excavations. Thanks for the great video!
Trig is rather easy once you get the basics. Love learning from your channel.
That AWWA C909 blue PVCO pipe is something else. Earthquake proof and practically crush proof.
I just learned about vacuum excavating recently. They are installing fiberoptic cables in my neighborhood, and there are vacuum excavators all over the place, digging holes for the new cables while trying to avoid all of the other existing stuff: phone cables; electrical cables; gas lines; water lines; TV cable lines; sewer lines; etc., etc., etc. It took me a few minutes to figure out what was going on, but I realized that it was a genius idea; quick, precise and clean excavation with very little risk of damaging anything. Once they are done, they come back with a slinger truck to fill the hole with soil.
They use directional drilling to run the cable horizontally, then dig vertical holes to join them up. For weeks, the neighborhood has been full with marking crews, directional drilling machinery, and vacuum excavators. It's not too inconvenient, and it's nice that a construction geek like me can observe an infrastructure project that has literally come to my front door.
One of the coolest things to me is that we can point at a mountain, say "I want the road to go through THAT", and we have a machine that not only drills the path but also installs the walls and sealant and ventilation etc slots as it goes. I play a lot of fantasy games, and I like to imagine blowing a dwarf's mind by showing them how we dig. :D The things we can do with our technology are absolutely fantastic, and they're mundane enough that we don't really know about a lot of them.
Thank you for videos like this one that show the process!
Definitely not as boring as I thought it would be.
Absolutely LOVE these videos! Please keep doing them. The more obscure the project the better
Watching how our world as we know it comes together is so intriguing to me and I am so thankful for people like you Grady, to allow me to watch this and become a part of it. Hope you have a great week!
I wish the rail companies would care as much about the well-being of their workers as they do for a construction site.
LOVE these videos! Especially appreciate the more detailed series, like the sewage pump station.
I hope more companies approach you when doing these projects!
I know this series may not get as many views and/or be treated as favorably by the RUclips algorithm, as some of your other stuff, but I hope that y'all still produce videos for this series! Practical construction has been very eye opening for me!
Yeaaa, a video about horizontal boring - always fascinating and it's almost all that's used here in the Arizona valley now-a-days because of the density of the place here now!
Really happy to see this video. I poured concrete for a job going under the rails and the contractor mentioned a different company would finish that portion. The work was electrical, but imagine some same work methods are used.
This brings back exhausting memories of my apprenticeship. Many many hours spent "potholing"
Grady- fascinating, as always. I live in the Tampa/St. Pete area and watched a crew push a new water line (with sections assembled) and pushed under the Intracoastal Waterway to the barrier island in Pinellas County. Your video helps me understand how this could possibly be accomplished. The engineering seems incredibly daunting. Big fan of your Practical Engineering and, now, Construction. Thanks Grady- you continue to make the complexities of our world understandable.
Learned the term potholing! Watched it done in my neighborhood a few weeks ago as a local fiber company is boring and installing fiber. They potholed around each water meter to avoid water lines since their proposed alignment came pretty close to existing lines. They did similar measurements around known gas/electric infrastructure, then painted their depths on the pavement nearby before starting the drilling operation. Very cool, and the backfill afterward made it look as if they were never there.
Maybe one of the most interesting new series from established youtubers; I don't know of anyone that combines both in-depth technical knowledge with on-site filming in such a compelling way. Hope you get many more partnerships in the future!
I'm a drafter for a civil engineering company and I have a project that has drilling for water main and sanitary sewer under a railroad line so it was cool to see this perspective because I'm usually always in the office and don't get too see it built