The Long View: Elon Musk and Brunel

I’m not one to turn down interesting opportunities! When I saw an email from the Women’s Engineering Society (WES) asking if any members wanted to be involved in Radio 4’s The Long View to discuss the comparison between Brunel’s Atmospheric Railway and Elon Musk’s Hyperloop, I jumped at the chance! They had experts on the panel already but wanted an additional engineering view.

A couple of days later I met the Radio 4 team at Paddington station (one of the many Brunel icons) and we set off for Didcot Parkway on Brunel’s famous Great Western Railway route.

(Snapshot from the recording of Radio 4’s The Long View with the Fire Fly)

It was a fascinating morning. Not only did I meet some very interesting people, get a behind the scenes view of making a radio programme, climb on board a broad-gauge locomotive and touch some of the remaining bits of Brunel’s atmospheric railway, but it made me consider how far we’ve come in terms of engineering and infrastructure. Taking the Long View and getting some perspective is a powerful thing!

I was thinking about how far we’ve come from the Brunel days of the original industrial revolution in Victorian times to where we are now in the so called 4th industrial revolution with the internet of things and intelligent infrastructure.  Brunel was a pioneer of his time, but I wonder what he would make of the world today with technology and data being an integral part of everything we do?

In quite a random connection to Brunel, one of the exciting projects I’m working on is related to Brunel’s GWR. We are working with Network Rail to trial our in-house remote monitoring and advanced analytics platform, Mercury, on one of Brunel’s GWR tunnels at Twerton in Bath built in 1836. Sensors have been retrofitted to key parts of the Grade II listed tunnel, in a wonderful synergy of old and new, and we are remotely capturing real-time micro-movements in the structure to monitor changes. We are also using Mercury’s analytics capability to understand relationships with things like ambient temperature. This gives extra assurance to Network Rail and also informs the Amey engineering team, so they can optimise their inspection and maintenance plans.

I wonder if Brunel ever envisaged the structures he created would become smart assets and have the ability to tell us what their condition is in real time! 

(Screenshot from Mercury)

The radio 4 show was drawing parallels with Musk and Brunel. I haven’t mentioned Elon Musk or the Hyperloop – unfortunately I don’t have any connection to that right now, but if Elon Musk or Richard Branson or any other Hyperloop companies are reading this – we’d love to trial Mercury for you too!

The Long View was aired this morning at 9am and you can listen again at 9:30pm tonight or afterwards on the Radio 4 podcast.