Andrew Lord Memorial Paper: Design and specification of chalk earthworks for High Speed One

High Speed One (HS1/CTRL) was probably the largest chalk engineering project in the UK in this century to date. It was fully opened in 2007. About 40 km of its length was built through chalk geology. Dr Andrew Lord was one of the leading chalk engineering practitioners in the UK up until his retirement in 2003 and was a chairman of the British Geotechnical Society (BGS). He was also the ground engineering manager for the HS1 project for several years. There was much innovation in regard to chalk earthworks for the project and the body of experience gained there, informed the chalk earthworks text in CIRIA Report C574 “Engineering in Chalk” published in 2002, and authored by Andrew Lord and Professors Chris Clayton and Rory Mortimore. With the recent start of the detailed design of High Speed Two (HS2) which passes through the chalk in a similar way to HS1, it is timely to draw together, review and summarise this body of knowledge into a series of three complementary papers. This is the first in this series. It starts with a tribute to Andrew. It then describes the state-of-the art chalk earthworks specification which was developed for HS1 and the design considerations and basis for that. The paper also discusses the design of the side slopes for the chalk earthworks.