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| RAIL PROFESSIONAL INTERVIEW
Interview
Kurt Zeidler, Principal at GALL ZEIDLER Consultants Sam Sherwood-Hale spoke to Kurt Zeidler, Principal at GALL ZEIDLER Consultants about his career, the history and development of tunnelling and GALL ZEIDLER’s work on HS2 You’ve had a career spanning 35 years, how far back does your involvement in the UK go? I would say it goes back a long time, I worked in the UK for the first time in 1991 on Crossrail, in its early days and then we founded the company in Austria in 1999 and then first opened a UK office in 2006. Of course, much of my career has been spent working all around the world but with quite a long time in the United States, that’s where I teamed up with Mr Gall and this formed the beginnings of Gall Zeidler. Then I came back to Europe in 2011, I decided it was time to put a bit more effort into the UK office, leaving Mr. Gall to run the operations in America. Of course going back further, it all started in my home country of Austria, where I worked primarily on construction sites, from 1981 to 1990, doing a little bit of design and then I started my own company in 1999. How has underground construction technology changed during that time? There have been significant changes, when I started, we used different materials and equipment. I remember my first tunnel was a TBM tunnel, it was a mainframe TBM which is for hard rock but there were no other TBMs available, and their use was very limited. Yet, over the first 20 years of my career the TBMs underwent enormous development, and now we can use them for almost any ground condition. So there has been an adequate development in this period, but it was not a quantum leap, there was a constant, steady improvement, especially in the materials that we use and in quality control, materials became much better known and more reliable which led to more repeatable results. But we haven’t really seen a quantum leap, because the industry is relatively conservative, so progress is slow. Where the codes regulations are concerned, I have seen the Euro code come into play, which didn’t exist when Rail Professional
