The bulk of this month’s issue of T&TI is set aside for the recently awarded Harding Prize winner, and two runner up papers (for a full description of the competition see T&TI December ‘06, p38). As was the case with the papers in the last Harding Prize, in 2005, the standard was highly impressive. Congratulations are due to the three finalists who presented their papers with great professionalism at April’s British Tunnelling Society meeting, in London.

Two points of concern though have been raised by this year’s competition. The number of entrants was very much down on the previous Harding Prize, which is worrying considering the amount of international tunnelling work on at present and that it is open to all engineers below the age of 33.

Are there really that few young engineers out there? Or are they there, but either cannot be bothered, don’t have time, or are not being encouraged by their seniors to write such papers?

The fact that the last Harding Prize was held whilst Section 2 of the Channel Tunnel Rail Link was in full swing is no excuse for there being more papers submitted back then. This year’s finalists were one paper from the UK, one from Asia, and one from North America. So the argument that a lack of large scale domestic work stops play holds no water. This competition is not purely aimed at the UK market.

There is definitely a case here for senior engineers to take the lead, and guide their younger engineers through the process of communicating the intricacies of their respective projects through reports such as those written for the Harding Prize.

Publishing shared experience, good and bad, should be a pre-requisite of such a challenging industry. This is key to its on-going health, and also the educating and nurturing of the young talent within the tunnelling community. They are, after all, tomorrow’s project managers.

Another concern is that not one contractor submitted a paper! Not good.

How can we expect other people to be impressed by our construction achievements, if we can’t even make the effort to tell each other? We’ve touched on this before in T&TI, but it still baffles me how reticent tunnelling engineers are about promoting themselves. We can’t complain about lean workloads if we don’t shout at any opportunity about our available skills.

Not many members of the public have any concept of what we do, or what we can offer, and if we continue in this vein, we are going in exactly the right direction to keep it that way.

Tris Thomas