Dublin - Metrolink (Swords to Charlemont only)

The next one should unquestionably be Dart Underground, but the pissing around over that really doesn't leave much to be desired.

I can think of many reasons to question your "unquestionable" assumption on DU. But it's off topic for this thread.

Great to see things making progress on MetroLink.

Looking at the submissions TCD and opw are making on Metrolink i think we will be looking at further delays sadly

Trinity and OPW sabotaging the city

Trinity must be worried their secret underground tunnels will be uncovered.

Open to correction here, but I understood that the current plans and investigatory works for Metrolink are far more advanced than Metro North even though it had got approval.

Where can the objections be read?

If this is the case, the time to make this known was at the early design phase. The engineers would have had enough brains to know that digging under a site that does scientific research would require them to check what exactly their plan would be digging under.

At a very early stage, Trinity world have been told that a section of their site was under consideration to have a tunnel beneath it. That was the time to object. Not now.

Can't see why such a solution wouldn't be part of the current design already if it was needed.

Here's what TCD are worried about. Their submission is entirely about electromagnetic interference from the metro interfering with the sensitive lab equipment at the science end of the Trinity. https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120252895#Comment_120252895

@specialbyte thanks for that information. As you say, TCD has been stupid in the past, but it's normal for new works to fix any issues they create for existing works, so in this case TII should include mitigation, as it seems they have.

RF isn't my specialty by any means, but I did study electronics, and I work adjacent to the field of RF comms. The knowledge of radio theory that I still have would suggest that the earth between the tunnels and the buildings in TCD will absorb most of the electromagnetic radiation from the metro: the highest-power EM emissions will be from sparking, and these would be in the high-frequency region (above 1MHz), a part of the radio spectrum that won't propagate through solid earth. The Very Low Frequencies (from fluctuations in DC voltage) on the other hand don't propagate well through air, and rely on ground-effects, but if the transmitter is not in the ground, then that radio energy would tends to travel along the boundary between materials - in this case, the tunnel's inner edge: in effect, the metro tunnel would be a waveguide, and very little EM radiation would escape.

The little that does escape would be a small contribution to the EM noise produced by all the electronic devices around a modern city (plus spark-ignition cars). AM radio and the less shielded emissions from DART trains are a bigger issue for them than any radiation from Metro. But the long wavelength of "near-DC" low frequency emissions would also mean that if these were as big a problem as TCD says, then there'd be no significant difference if the route was moved up to half a kilometre either side of Trinity, which would nicely illustrate how unreasonable their complaint is - the choices are either that Dublin gets no metro, or that TCD adds some (more) EM insulation to a couple of its buildings.

Is it possible they're positioning themselves for a payoff.