Pump up the volume

摘要

It has already been surrounded by plenty of hype - just look at some of the numbers in the box on page 6 - but make no bones about it, barring a political catastrophe, construction of the HS2 rail link is going to present the UK earthmoving sector with a once-in-a-career opportunity. An opportunity to move more cubic metres than has been seen for 30 years, since the great motorway-building days of the 1980s, that older construction people speak of with misty eyes; an opportunity, too, to put into practice on a some of the high-tech equipment techniques that have been only seen in mines and quarries or overseas.And an opportunity to offer a huge platform for the suppliers of the latest high-productivity earthmoving kit to show that their advances really do make a big difference to the efficiency of a project - because scaled up to HS2-sized volumes, these advances should make a massive difference to timescales, and to the bottom line.