The Hidden Underworld Systems That Quietly Save Our Cities | Blueprint

[00:00:01]Cities, an urban battleground for engineers challenged with building some of the world's most impossible railways.

[00:00:11]Where increasing populations and the pressure to bring people to and from the heart of these metropolises quickly demands serious innovation.

[00:00:24]For one city, it's an age-old problem.

[00:00:35]The railway is a great way to keep the lines of communication between people flowing.

[00:00:41]But when a city expands and its population swells, if the mail can't get through, then conversations could end up feeling a little one-sided.

[00:00:57]>> [music] >> London at the turn of the 20th century.

[00:01:04]In just 100 years, England's [music] capital experienced a rapid rise in its population, growing from less than 1 million to over 6 and a half million.

[00:01:17]Under the strain of this hasty expansion, in a scenario similar to today's most congested cities, getting around became a serious problem. as physicist Andrew Steele is experiencing for himself.

[00:01:30]>> In the early 1900s, London was one of the largest and most populous urban areas in the world. And just like today, congestion was a real problem. You can easily imagine these vans being replaced by horsedrawn carriages, [music] but the problem is pretty much the same. It's not about how many horsepower you've got if you're just stuck in traffic like this.

[00:01:49]Be in this cab [music] about 20 minutes and I don't think we've gone a mile.

[00:01:52]This is why I cycle around town normally.

[00:01:56]But it wasn't only commuters that were suffering the consequences of the backed up traffic.

[00:02:03]London's postal [music] service relied heavily on the roads. But with mail coaches barely managing a cruel, the deliveries were suffering severe delays.

[00:02:13]In those days, one of the most important ways to communicate was by post. And with sorting offices spread across London, the post office was going to have to find a faster and more efficient way to get that mail around town if the capital was going to stay connected.

[00:02:28]Today, Andrew is on route to discover how one pioneering railway helped keep the lines of communication flowing.

[00:02:40]The solution the post office engineers came up with lies down here 20 m below the city's crowded streets in 1927. One of the most unique railways the world had ever seen launched.

[00:02:56]>> Check this out. This is what they came up with. The London Post Office Railway.

[00:03:00][music] What an amazing contraption.

[00:03:08]The world's first driverless electric railway.

[00:03:12]These miniature trains rode an underground network of 35 km of track at speeds of up to 48 kmh, serving eight stations and sorting offices.

[00:03:25]For 3/4 of a century, it ran uninterrupted, carrying up to 4 million letters a day. And London hardly even knew this ingenious system existed.

[00:03:38]>> This is so impressive. I've lived in London for years and I had no idea that all this was down here, let alone that it was still running in 2003, delivering letters right across London. This place is now just a tourist attraction. But back in 1927 when it was opened, it was a real engineering pioneer, allowing it to run for an astounding 22 hours a day, delivering millions of letters all across London.

[00:04:05]But constructing this urban railway and its labyrinth of tunnels [music] was no mean feat. Designed to run trains that are 61 [music] cm in width, male rails tunnels are just 2.7 m in diameter, much smaller than those servicing London's passenger underground network today.

[00:04:25]Wow, what an amazing place to be. We're going deeper underground and it's really quite cramped down here. Imagine the workers excavating these tunnels. It must have been grueling work and also not a job for the claustrophobic.

[00:04:40]Underground tunneling in London was by no means a new concept in the early 1900s, but the early work on tunnels for the tube network had been an arduous and dangerous endeavor thanks to the challenging conditions.

[00:04:56]The layer of soft clay beneath London meant water could seep in, potentially causing the tunnels to collapse.

[00:05:05]The post office were building over 20 m below the streets of London. And so they needed this tunnel excavation to be quick and efficient, but most importantly safe for the workers doing the excavating.

[00:05:17]>> The innovative solution to this problem came from one of tunneling's great pioneers, James Greathead. [music] The solution the engineers used was called the great head tunnel shield. It worked a bit like this cookie cutter. So imagine I'm trying to build a tunnel going towards you in this material here.

[00:05:35]What we can do is place our tunnel shield in position. Shove it forward with a series of hydraulic rams. And as this cutting edge dislodges material, workers inside can excavate it safely protected by the shield. Then as it moves forward a bit further, we can start constructing the lining of the tunnel behind the shield as it moves, making the whole process fast and efficient and most importantly safe for the workers who are protected inside here.

[00:06:01]This groundbreaking technique not only made it possible to build this railway, it also enabled the London Underground to dig much deeper, heralding the transformation of London's transport network.

[00:06:16]It took 3 years to dig the tunnel system for the post office railway.

[00:06:20]Construction was halted when World War I broke out. But in 1927, with the rails laid, this innovative electric railway finally started operating.

[00:06:33][music] However, London's postal system would encounter another problem, one that threatened to derail the whole project.

[00:06:42]The route between the stations was essentially a giant loop. And as you can see, the corners can get pretty tight.

[00:06:48]Now, in the original design of the trains, the wheel basease, so the distance between the wheels was about 2 m. So, just let me show you what that means by getting out this tape measure.

[00:06:57]You can see with this straight tape measure laying on the curve, it's just not following the track at all. What that meant was that there was a lot of wear and tear on the wheels on the track itself. And in the worst case scenario, trains could get derailed, get stuck, and that could stop the whole network entirely. Now, derailed train is really bad news for those letters and parcels making it to their recipients on time.

[00:07:19]So, what was needed was some kind of engineering solution to allow the trains to navigate around these difficult corners.

[00:07:26]If the engineers were to keep their trains on track and deliveries regular, they would [music] need to go back to the drawing board and redesign them from the wheels up.

[00:07:37]>> This stuff's all just been down here pretty much untouched [music] since 2003.

[00:07:41]to see the solution engineers devised.

[00:07:43]Andrew has been given special access to where the post office railways fleet have been stored for decades.

[00:07:52]This is the new design. And so the first thing we can do is get out the tape measure again and just measure this distance here between the wheels. It's about 1 m 30 or 1 m 40. So much shorter.

[00:08:02]And the other big innovation is that this is connected into what's called a bogey. And it's made up of this big wheel here, which is the drive wheel, which is directly connected to the electric motor, which is underneath this section here. And then we got this smaller wheel here at the back, which is connected to carry the weight of that carriage. And that means that this long carriage here is able to be articulated to rotate around this point, which is known as the king pin. And that meant that these trains are much more flexible when it comes to going around tight bends. Additionally, it meant you could have a much longer carriage in between these bogeies.

[00:08:36]This new design came with a number of significant advantages. Firstly, there was less wear and tear on the wheels and the track. Secondly, there was less chance of derailments. And thirdly, these lovely long carriages meant that we could carry more posts beneath [music] the streets of London.

[00:08:53]Solving this final engineering puzzle enabled the post office railway to run successfully for 76 years, reducing travel time across the capital and in the process [music] alleviating congestion on London's busy streets.

[00:09:18]This is pretty cool.

[00:09:22]In the 20th century, this was a gamecher for the capital. A hidden hero working tirelessly below ground to keep London communicating and in touch with the rest of the world.

[00:09:40]Cities also rely on trains to keep themselves fully stocked.

[00:09:47]But when mother nature brings them to a grinding halt, keeping the goods coming in can have huge consequences.

[00:09:57]Congestion and commuter chaos can clog up the streets, leaving the city at a standstill.

[00:10:07]And if ever there was a city facing these problems, [music] it's New York.

[00:10:12]With its streets gridlocked for hours on end, the city of dreams is a traffic nightmare. Rail holage would be the perfect solution to take the pressure off the roads, but trains have a seemingly impossible obstacle to overcome.

[00:10:29]Water everywhere.

[00:10:33]Dr. Eric Lemur is cruising just off Manhattan to discover how the resurgence of a novel nautical solution is helping the city solve one of its longest standing engineering challenges.

[00:10:49]New York City with a population of over 8.5 million is one of the biggest and busiest in the world. And so it needs a constant supply of food and goods and materials to keep it running. And yet, incredibly, it's cut off from the supply lines that serve the rest of the country, the freight rail network.

[00:11:13][music] Although passenger trains can access the city, the many rivers surrounding the port of New York have made it largely inaccessible to freight trains.

[00:11:24]The majority of supplies arriving by trucks, stifling its already congested streets.

[00:11:32]But thankfully, one impossible railway is providing an alternative.

[00:11:38]This is it. This is the New York, New Jersey Rail Car Float.

[00:11:45]An ingenious innovation that feries trackmounted freight trains across a 4 and 1/2 mile stretch of the Hudson River.

[00:11:54]They're just loading on the last of the rail cars right now. And then those tugboats are going to push it all the way across the waterway into New York City.

[00:12:04]>> With a single rail car capable of carrying four lorry loads, the 14 car capacity of the float means it can do the work of 56 lorries in just one 45minute crossing.

[00:12:17]You can hear when the freight gets onto the barges, there's this just this loud of the metal moving.

[00:12:27]Once upon a time, floats like this would have absolutely clogged the waterways.

[00:12:31]You would have seen them going back and forth because it's the only way to get goods into Manhattan. But now, this is the last of its kind that operates on the Hudson and one of the last in the world.

[00:12:44]As an historic center of commerce, New York's demand for railway freight stretches back to the 1800s.

[00:12:53]But faced with this watery archipelago, getting any goods into the city required an overland detour via Albany to the north, adding as much as 36 hours to the journey.

[00:13:06]It was Brigadier General and former railroad engineer Herman Halt who first pioneered a more convenient solution.

[00:13:19]First used during the American Civil War, his simple barge fitted with railroad tracks was an inventive idea.

[00:13:27]But as engineers developed it for the Hudson [music] River, achieving a smooth transition between land and barge posed a sizable problem.

[00:13:38]Now, this is a tidal river and that means that the water level goes up and down and the amount of weight inside of the freight car changes and that means that the float is at different levels at any given time. And the tracks need to line up. They need to line up on land and the barge so that the freight train could roll seamlessly onto land.

[00:14:01]The key to achieving this pinpoint [music] accuracy is a structure known as a transfer bridge.

[00:14:09]In really simple terms, this transfer bridge is the portal between land and sea. And I have a little model to show you how it works.

[00:14:20]And it's quite simple. We have a winch at the very top of the transfer bridge.

[00:14:26]Now when the barge comes up, the winch can turn moving along cables that I have represented here by strings and it can raise or lower the tracks to suit the needs at the time. So you can match it up perfectly so it becomes one continuous track.

[00:14:45][music] The extreme engineering needs to cope with enormous forces as the floating barge loaded with heavy rail cars twists and turns in the tidal river. But the system of giant hinges combined with superersized steel toggle bars transfer the huge loads through to the bridg's substructure and the earth below.

[00:15:11]So this whole thing it's brilliant.

[00:15:18]At its peak, this creative solution for the city's railway transported 6,000 freight cars every day.

[00:15:29]Today, the rail car float shifts considerably less of New [music] York's goods, but is still a crucial lifeline.

[00:15:38]When we think about the city, we don't really think about the freight and the railways that make it possible. But the fundamentals, the things that make it function, make it work, is an old barge that's been quietly carrying tons of freight back and forth daily for for years.

[00:15:58]And with plans of foot to float 24,000 rail cars across the Hudson every year, this green alternative to the city's congested streets once more appears to be on the up.

[00:16:12]And there we go. It just docked. It's completed its journey. It's going to do the same thing tomorrow and the day after. It's an amazing lifeline for New York.

[00:16:28]As a city grows, so do the demands of its railways.

[00:16:33]More people means more trains to move them.

[00:16:37]But what happens when a city grows so fast the railway just can't keep up?

[00:16:43][music] New York City, a metropolis that relies heavily on its railways.

[00:16:54]With around 90 million passengers [music] a year traveling to Manhattan from Long Island to its east, the busiest commuter line in the US is desperately overstretched.

[00:17:08]To relieve the strain, engineers and construction workers are at work in the very epicenter of the city's railway network. Not that many would notice.

[00:17:18]So, we're here in the heart of Grand Central Terminal. This is where hundreds of thousands of passengers a day come through to to to take the trains.

[00:17:28]>> Mike Pujack is part of the team working in near to solve New York's commuter problems.

[00:17:35]Given how packed and congested Midtown Manhattan is, we have to work like a stealth project. All of our materials and all of our equipment still to this day has to come in from Queens and the Bronx to feed this job.

[00:17:50]>> Despite the challenges, the city's non-stop transit system is operating undisturbed.

[00:17:56]It's remarkable that hundreds of thousands of tourists and commuters come into Grand Central every day into this iconic structure and don't have any idea of the magnitude of the construction that's going on right below their feet.

[00:18:14]The East Side Access Project with ambitions to completely transform the transit network in New York. It's an undertaking on a truly grand scale.

[00:18:28]>> This is one of the largest infrastructure projects ongoing in the US right now.

[00:18:34]This is incredibly important for New York. This project is 11.1 billion and we have right now currently about 1,600 people working on it and at one point we peaked out at 2,600 people a day working on this project.

[00:18:55]Connecting one of the world's largest railway commuter stations with the busiest commuter railroad in the US via more than 12 km of tunnel. East Side Access will carry trains along a network of new and refurbished tunnels into a four platform 8 track terminal directly under Grand Central Terminal and Park Avenue.

[00:19:21]It's a giant space that must be constructed from scratch.

[00:19:25]And that's easier said than done when you're operating under some of the most expensive real estate on the planet.

[00:19:33]So, we're in the East Side Access Caverns here and we're 150 ft below Park Avenue and Grand Central Terminal. If you don't carefully plan what you had to do down here, you will wind up creating a situation where you could disturb the ground because it could influence some of the structures above >> with the consequences of any errors adding to a potentially multi-billion dollar disruption. It's a scenario that had to be avoided at all costs. We could not interrupt this economic area and the and the traveling public coming into Grand Central because that's a lifeline for the for the economy in this area.

[00:20:12]>> To create this vast underground terminal, Mike and his team utilized an appropriately or inspiring solution.

[00:20:32]Just to set the stage here, this is all Manhattan bedrock. There was nothing here. And then we use drill blast methods to uh basically carve out the balance of of the structure.

[00:20:43]It's controlled blasting. So you basically calculate the the amount of powder you're going to use to control how much rock you want to remove. And then you measure the vibrations so that way you don't do any impose any uh issues to the buildings and the structures above.

[00:20:58][music] When finally excavated this space was 1150 ft long which is larger than the the Chrysler building is tall and it was 60t high by 60 foot wide and we have two caverns. I mean to do 2500 blasts under Grand Central and not impact them required a lot of coordination with Metro North.

[00:21:22]Work on this super sized city railway began in 2007 with the launch of a pair of giant tunnel boring machines under Manhattan.

[00:21:35]Using powerful cutting heads to burrow through the layers of dense rock, the tunnel boring machines were set on course towards Grand Central. [music] As tunnel engineer Jeff Rice recalls, operating in the heart of New York caused complications.

[00:21:53]We were in a uh burgeoning city somewhere where there wasn't already an overfilled Penn Station and a historic Grand Central in the way. uh completely developed Manhattan um a heavily traveled train traffic areas and the within the project limits the project would have been much simpler.

[00:22:14]The huge volumes of rock and muck generated by the tunneling process meant removing it created a logistical dilemma.

[00:22:25]Since we couldn't bring muck up through Grand Central and it was not viable to bring it up by train out of Grand Central, we needed to bring it out where it could be handled for trucking.

[00:22:35]>> With working out of the overcrowded center of Manhattan not an option, the team had no alternative but to take the muck the long way round.

[00:22:45]>> The rock removed from the tunnels was then brought back entirely through the second tube of the existing tunnel on a conveyor system out to Queens.

[00:22:55]The sheer volume of rock that was removed for the length of all the tunnels, it's time consuming.

[00:23:02]>> Stretching for almost 2,000 m, the giant conveyor fed out to a construction yard where rubble was loaded onto trucks.

[00:23:11]>> Thousands of tons of material was brought out. The tunnel has become pretty much a highway for all the resources in and out of the tunnel.

[00:23:21]But one section of tunnel under Queens poses East Side Access's engineers with a particularly tricky set of problems.

[00:23:31]>> There you go.

[00:23:33]>> With soft ground, a high water table, and a mass of active city infrastructure to contend with, inspired engineering solutions are required.

[00:23:45]What we're approaching is uh one of the greatest challenges on the east side access project is the Northern Boulevard crossing. As you can see, Northern Boulevard at midday is still a heavily [music] traveled uh truck route. It comes ah historialine train on the elevated structure.

[00:24:02]On top of the elevated structure and Northern Boulevard, underneath Northern Boulevard is a fivetrack subway structure, one of the heaviest traveled lines in all of New York City.

[00:24:14]>> [music] >> To get the trains for east side access to their destination, the route must cross directly below these three major transport links. [music] But the challenging ground conditions leave only a small area of viable material to tunnel through and little margin for error.

[00:24:35]All the traditional methods and particularly methods that were tried and true here in New York City and in North America in general, they met defeat. We didn't want to do something innovative.

[00:24:47]We had to do something innovative here.

[00:24:51]With just 3 m of soil between the subway and the new tunnel, the engineering required to solve this problem had to be bold.

[00:25:02]This is one of, if [music] it's not necessarily the first, but this was the first time for a tunnel in the in North America where we able to horizontally freeze the ground. Freeze pipes basically carried uh tubes that ran back and forth to a freeze plant. The freeze plant used a chilled brine to pump the chilled brine through all of the pipes individually and freeze the ground slowly.

[00:25:30]Creating this frozen layer of earth helped to strengthen the ground sufficiently to tunnel in safety.

[00:25:38]>> The frozen arch performed better than we expected. That provided the initial support to allow us to actually perform the sequential tunneling underneath to uh protect the subway box and the elevated structure and the street. It it very high stakes but in the end it was a very big success and very proud of it.

[00:26:01]Work to complete this railway is ongoing, but East Side Access will also need to be able to handle the demands of a mass of New York commuters.

[00:26:10]>> In a peak time frame, when this job is running, Long Island Railroad plans to move 24 trains an hour into the terminal. And that's adding a lot more people down below 150 ft below Park Avenue that have to get out to the street. And with that, that'll be 160,000 people that have to be moved.

[00:26:26]And we needed to figure out a way to do that.

[00:26:29]The answer, as with all things on this impressive urban project, is on an enormous scale.

[00:26:40]We have 17 high-rise escalators altogether that will head down to the caverns below. They're 90 foot high escalators, and when they're completed, they'll be the the the longest escalators in New York City and some of the longest in the country. at a 150 foot run. These are some massive escalators that are being constructed here to connect the concourse with the caverns down below.

[00:27:03]Right now, we're we're rigging in one of the truss sections so the the um the escalator comes and putting it on the incline and then they'll bolt it up together and then they'll they'll install the next one.

[00:27:13]You're working on 30° slope, so everything's cabled back and winched back. And they use a whole bunch of chain falls to lower these things safely into place so they can they can interlock them and go to the next unit.

[00:27:26]Huge volumes of passengers are expected to flow into the new terminal each day.

[00:27:31]So the efficient movement of people will be essential to the project success.

[00:27:37]>> We're heavily relying on passenger flow utilizing these banks of of escalators.

[00:27:41]These are what will be the main feed of bringing everybody up from the caverns or down to the caverns up to the concourse level to the street and and into Grand Central Proper itself.

[00:27:51]>> But simply getting these giant escalators below ground has been a challenge in itself.

[00:27:57]>> The contractor has no access from Manhattan to build out this job, which is kind of unique. We couldn't come into the middle of 42nd Street and in Midtown and and just start taking out uh you know and doing an open cut. We had to bring in everything from from a remote area from uh Bronx on work trains just to access this.

[00:28:19]>> It's another epic achievement in a project that once complete will stand amongst the most impressive feats of urban railway infrastructure anywhere on the planet. [music] >> Everything on this job is larger than life. The [snorts] tunnels are [music] more difficult than the usual tunnel.

[00:28:38]the soil conditions have been more difficult >> and despite all the obstacles, the goal is to unveil east side access to the commuters of New York in 2022.

[00:28:50]>> When this is done, we're going to greatly improve the access to New York City for riders from Long Island. It is a significant achievement and I'm proud to have this on my resume.

[00:29:03]Thanks to the hard work of Jeff, Mike, and many more like them, the city will soon be able to rely on another Impossible Railway.

[00:29:14]It was personally rewarding to work on a project this long and know that it's going to be around for generations to come and and really change the infrastructure in Manhattan.

[00:29:24]of what was once just bedrock turning into this grand historic uh landmark structure that it will be.

[00:29:32]It's an amazing project.

[00:29:39]Lisbon, founded in 205 BC, may have been brilliant as a port, but it's a nightmare for anyone [music] planning a railway. It's known as the city of seven hills. A sprawling mass of windy historic streets and extreme gradients which provide an exhausting daily climb for its residents.

[00:30:00]But one ambitious railway engineer thought he had a solution. And the key to its magic lies in a little known space beneath the city streets where museum director Susanna Fonka is getting [music] special access.

[00:30:15]Now we are in the machine room. Most of the people doesn't know that exists.

[00:30:21][music] We are underground.

[00:30:25]This unassuming room is the secret behind a truly remarkable innovation that conquered Lisbon's inclines.

[00:30:37]Here we have Lavre ficular, the first street [music] finicular in the world.

[00:30:50]It runs for almost 200 m in a very very steep gradient of [music] 25%.

[00:31:00]It was the 19th century engineer Raul Mesnier Deonad's [music] inspiration to bring what is commonly used as a mountain railway to the city.

[00:31:11]Influenced by the trains of the Alps, Deons's [music] ficula replaced donkey power, whisking Lisbon's residents up this extreme gradient in a matter of minutes.

[00:31:24]He thought it's the most perfect transport for our hills here in the city and it worked just fine till today and they are still reliable and they're still comfortable for making this journey through the hills of Lisbon.

[00:31:48]This impossible railway's uncanny ability to climb defies belief, but its solution beneath Lisbon's streets is surprisingly simple. A single cable at the heart of an extraordinary system.

[00:32:02]>> And here is the machine with the cable [music] who made the counterbalance for the finicular to work.

[00:32:11]The counterbalance is created as the cable rotates around two parallel tracks on the street above connecting two trains. One traveling up and one traveling down.

[00:32:23]The one who's coming up had no traction [music] to run over the hill. So the one who is going down makes the counterbalance [music] for the one who's coming up.

[00:32:38]Originally, this counterbalance was created by adding weight to the descending train. On board, a water-filled tank increased its mass, creating a large force through the cable, pulling the ascending [music] train up the hill.

[00:32:54]To this day, three finicular lines remain, but Deons's legacy doesn't end there.

[00:33:02]A fleet of historic trams nimly negotiate the rest of Lisbon's hilly terrain. People of Lisbon love the trams. It's a symbol of Lisbon. Everyone uses the trams and we simply love it.

[00:33:20]Unlike a conventional railway, the slimline cars are a perfect solution for the capital's tight, windy streets. The city is so passionate about them, modern articulated trams have also been introduced to serve Lisbon's flatter terrain.

[00:33:35]We have about 60 trams and 10 million people a year using the tram system and we are growing.

[00:33:48]With this expanding network running almost 20 hours a day, the popularity of the trams is posing new problems for the city's railway engineers.

[00:33:57]Any maintenance has to be carried out in the dead of night.

[00:34:07]It's 1:30 in the morning and we are just beginning. So this job will take at least two more hours. In railway you always have to work at night because that's the time that we have no trams going around. We always have to have our eyes in our main goal which is never but never stop the trams.

[00:34:30]With the whole tram system now electric, keeping it powered up through Lisbon's ancient streets is a constant challenge for senior engineer Pedro Palmer.

[00:34:44]>> Nowadays we have around 67 kilometers of line and here we are replacing about 50 m of contact wire.

[00:34:56]So all this curve is already worn out.

[00:34:59]Hopefully the new one will last another five or 10 years.

[00:35:07]>> And with a new 2 and 1/2 km extension to the tram network in construction, Pedro and his team are also part of the railway's future.

[00:35:17]>> It's pretty exciting to be constructing new lines.

[00:35:23]>> If we have the right conditions, we can weigh down up to 30 m per week.

[00:35:29]The expansion project may be cutting edge, but the team still use traditional welding methods, joining the sections of track with a series of box molds.

[00:35:41]The material will be melted inside a box that is put around the rail.

[00:35:49]And then when we take these pieces out, there will be the new lines.

[00:35:55]Once the molten metal is cooled, it's ground down, creating a seamless join.

[00:36:06]>> We have to be really precise about it.

[00:36:09]Millimeter precision, that's for sure.

[00:36:15]>> As this latest stretch of line is weaved into the city's streets, the tramways are undoubtedly continuing to shape Lisbon's future.

[00:36:26]I'm really thrilled to be part of the this expansion because history is being made for us railway engineers to build as we do. It's the most thrilling part of the job. And this is the real deal.

[00:36:43]And for the capital's residents, Lisbon simply wouldn't be the same without its impossible railway.

[00:36:52]Lisbon without tramps will be like Venice with no gondelas.

[00:37:01][music] Cities rely on trains to keep them fully stocked.

[00:37:10]>> But when freight is coming in fast and those bringing it from ship to shore can't keep up.

[00:37:20]Those [music] delays could end up bringing everyone and everything to a standstill.

[00:37:35]Hamburg in northern Germany.

[00:37:40]Despite being positioned 110 km in land, [music] incredibly, this leading city of international trade has grown and thrives from its busy port, Europe's third largest.

[00:37:57]It's hardly any distance at all from the center of the city of Hamburg. And yet, there's this huge dock connected to the North Sea by the Ela River. Hamburg links Europe with the trade from East Asia and the Baltic region.

[00:38:13]But this port became so busy that its infrastructure began to struggle.

[00:38:19]In order to keep up with the sheer volume of freight coming in, engineers decided to create a rail network like never before.

[00:38:33]The sheer scale of this place is just incredible. It's taken us 5 or 10 minutes just to drive from one end of this terminal [music] to the other.

[00:38:42]>> In 2002, they opened the Alton Vader Terminal, the largest container rail terminal in Europe.

[00:38:52]Looking around this port, you can see the crucial importance of rails. Not just for the trains that ultimately take a lot of the goods out of this place, but for all of the operations inside the port. Everything is running on rails.

[00:39:04]Everywhere around me there are these giant cranes constantly everything's bustling moving these containers off the ships onto the land then replacing them with new containers from over there keeping this whole port moving.

[00:39:17]The real secret to [music] this place is enormous efficiency is these things. And we've got a rail looking much more like a conventional railway. But the thing that's weird about this is we've just got one. And if we were to imagine this as a train track, it has a ridiculously wide gauge cuz the other rail is somewhere over the other side there.

[00:39:34]This is an RMG or a railmounted gantry.

[00:39:38]And what this allows it to do is move this huge crane system up and down along this massive stack of containers and access any one of them.

[00:39:47]Historically, both the port and city have grown in tandem with a road and rail network to distribute the cargo.

[00:39:55]But in recent years, a combination of ships getting larger and a global increase in the use of containers has led to a massive rise in the levels of cargo at the port.

[00:40:09]For sales director Thomas Luchia, keeping the freight moving is critically important.

[00:40:15]Hamburg is one of the busiest industrial areas we have in in Europe.

[00:40:21]1990 we had a number of about 2,000 containers which were loaded and discharged.

[00:40:30]Now we discharge up to 40,000 of those containers. So [music] the the pure size of the the volume has tremendously changed and this is something [music] I wouldn't have dreamed of uh 1990 and [music] by 2030 the volume of containers that the port will handle is predicted to increase by a further 43%.

[00:41:00]>> [music] >> But located in the heart of the city, the port has limited space for expansion, leaving no other option but to find a way to handle the freight more efficiently.

[00:41:12]One challenge to work the vessel, but the other challenge that is what you exactly see here is the challenge to get them into the hinterland.

[00:41:24]A truck it can carry two of those containers. A train carries 100. So we need to use the capacity which we have in German and European hinterland best because we will not get new train tracks, new motorways. We have to use them better than before. And the answer for that for us here in the north is the railway.

[00:41:50]When we started with this facility CTA 16 years ago, uh this was the first fully automated terminal and I tell you in the first years everybody was laughing about us. Uh now it's standard.

[00:42:03]All new terminals worldwide in Europe and in Asia is developed the same way than than here because you get the highest capacity out of it and you are damn fast.

[00:42:18]This high-tech terminal has the capacity to handle cargo from four ships simultaneously and distribute it onwards into Europe, either by train or lorry.

[00:42:30]Railways have long been integral [music] to the distribution of freight once it comes off ships. But what's surprising is that as soon as this ship hits the keyside, it's immediately confronted by rails.

[00:42:41]Container handling is divided into two stages. The first is at the wateride and is the only part of the process that requires a human crane operator.

[00:42:52]>> Just look at the size of these cranes.

[00:42:55]These things are called shipto-shore cranes for the obvious reason that they move the containers off the ships and onto the shore. And they are gigantic.

[00:43:02]If that top beam gets tilted up to its maximum height, it can reach over 100 meters in the air. They're called dual trolley because the top trolley there brings the container off the ship down to this level here where a second trolley moves it onto some automated vehicles over on the other side. They are incredibly efficient and move huge, huge numbers of containers.

[00:43:23]The next stage of the process uses a second type of rail-mounted gantry, automated stacking cranes. two remotely controlled cranes working at different heights along a stack of containers, taking them to and from automated vehicles. Mounting these RMGs on rails is an incredible example of engineering efficiency. This whole thing is controlled by software. The software says which containers are going to be pulled out, which trucks are going to be here to receive them, and it makes sure this enormous operation can run smoothly and efficiently.

[00:43:56]The Port of Hamburg's bold use of technology has transformed the way the port and city operates with billions of objects connected to a computerized system via intelligent sensors.

[00:44:10]The degree of automation here is just astonishing. You've got these thousands of transponders sensing the location of every one of those vehicles. Not a single human being. And those things, there are some that are electric. There are some that are diesel powered. And when they run out of batteries or run out of fuel, they can automatically drive themselves to the filling station or to a different station that swaps out their batteries and get straight back on with their work.

[00:44:34]This groundbreaking solution to handling cargo means that the port can now process over 7 million containers per year, setting new global standards.

[00:44:45]In 2017, 58,500 freight trains passed through Hamburg rail port, transporting vital goods to its city and beyond. This port is just such an impressive operation, and the whole thing is running on rails to bring the goods onto this train track below me and transport the cargo all around Europe. It's just incredibly efficient.

[00:45:08]All of it choreographed by software. And without rails, that just wouldn't be possible.

[00:45:24]Since the invention of trains, the cities of the world have given engineers some of their toughest challenges, inspiring daring solutions.

[00:45:37]>> Yeah, the cable cars is the backdrop to everything. uh San Francisco and the grades that the cable cars uh overcome.

[00:45:46]It's amazing to think that everybody can enjoy and get around the city >> and groundbreaking innovations.

[00:45:54]>> Nearly everything [music] you buy from food to clothes to cars is shipped in these giant containers on these enormous ships. And without rails, none of this would be possible.

[00:46:04]to create impossible railways >> while not impacting the everyday operations of the New York City uh passengers. We have been building one of the largest civil projects in the history of North America.