The lack of either a train or bus service means I will have to miss the scarlets v ospreys derby on boxing day. Shame

#rugby #bkturc #SCAvOSP

Argentina lock Rubiolo signs long-term Bristol deal

Bristol Bears' Argentina lock Pedro Rubiolo commits his long-term future to the Prem side.

https://www.bbc.com/sport/rugby-union/articles/c075lvnv1mjo?at_medium=RSS&at_campaign=rss

(c) #BBC #News #Sport #Rugby

Ex-captain Brierley retires to become Salford CEO

Former Salford captain Ryan Brierley is to take over as the club's chief executive, the consortium that has won the bid to run the club has said.

https://www.bbc.com/sport/rugby-league/articles/cgex4rqwp8wo?at_medium=RSS&at_campaign=rss

(c) #BBC #News #Sport #Rugby

[TRANSFERT]. Le capitaine des Springboks va quitter les Sharks de Durban ! 🇿🇦 #Rugby

https://rugbyfil.fr/rugby-transfert-le-capitaine-des-springboks-siya-kolisi-de-retour-aux-sources/

The thread about The Mound’s Electric Blanket; keeping buses (and rugby) running in the face of “winter’s fierce onslaught”

Once again we somehow find that it is December in Edinburgh, temperatures are forecast to drop below freezing within the week and it is only be a matter of time before Edinburgh Live treats us to doom-laden predictions of the “exact time” we will be hit by “Arctic blasts” and “snow bombs“. Relatively speaking our city isn’t actually a particularly cold one and it is even less a snowy one, but when the temperatures do drop the steep gradients of its north-facing streets can prove treacherous if the council hasn’t been out with its gritters. Seventy-odd years ago, the authorities faced a particular headache from one such street: with few surrounding buildings and a deliberately adverse camber, factors conspired to make The Mound an accident black-spot, one so prone to icing that it was the most intensely gritted road in the city.

The Mound is one of the most dangerous street surfaces in winter for the motorist.

The Mound posed a particular risk to buses. Three people were injured in April 1940 when a single decker Corporation bus skidded in wet weather and hit one of the bollards on the outside of the bend. In October 1945 a double-decker had an even more dramatic accident; losing grip in the wet it skidded across the road and flopped over onto its side: a plummet down the precipitous embankment and onto the railway below being arrested only by the slender cast iron railings. Although 29 people were injured, the railings held and a real catastrophe was avoided. They held again in the winter of 1951 when two more buses ended up being caught by them but it was time for the authorities to act. A particular problem was the adverse road camber, which had been deliberately engineered so that any horse carts which ran away downhill would be directed into the kerb and naturally brought to a halt. In an age of faster, heavier, motorised vehicles this meant that those travelling downhill were pushed outwards towards the kerb by the laws of physics and were more prone to skidding.

The Corporation spent £2,500 altering the camber on the corner, lowering the roadway on the inside of the curve, a change which explains why the pavement here now has two courses of kerbstones and a double step down to road level. One part of the problem had been dealt with but the risk from cold weather remained and – with buses rapidly replacing tramcars as the city’s public transport of choice – was actually increasing. Tired of the effort and expense of gritting, the city sought a more permanent solution. Harold Wilson’s “White Heat of Technology” speech was still a few years away but it was the heat of technology that the Corporation sought to harness. Encouraged by experiments in carriageway heating conducted by the Ministry of Transport on the Chiswick fly-over in 1956 and with the newly-formed South of Scotland Electricity Board (SSEB) keen to support anything electrical, in December 1958 a proposal was made to install the UK’s first operational sub-surface road heating system on The Mound. Approval was forthcoming from the Corporation’s Works Committee for the installation of 372 mats formed of 47 miles of electrical wire and covering some 5,500 square yards of the road surface, buried one and a half inches beneath it and fed by 760 kilowatts of heating power from a dedicated sub-station, discreetly tucked into the embankment with West Princes Street Gardens.

The heating was to be sufficient to raise the ground temperature to 35°F (1.7°C) when the ambient temperature was as low as 20°F (-6.7°C). Even before the scheme had come before the committee for approval the papers had taken to calling it an “electric blanket” and the name stuck – even though one Scotsman journalist pointed out that this was “a complete misnomer” and it was in fact “merely a simple grid of wires“.

The contract for £4,556 plus a further £1,000 on the control equipment was awarded to Messrs George Wimpey Ltd. and included the removal of the now redundant tramway rails and relaying the surface with a special smooth tarmac that would not damage the wires embedded within it. The electrical equipment was sub-contracted to E. N. Bray Ltd. of Waltham Cross, Hertfordshire and was installed by William Allan, Smith & Co. of Edinburgh. This was a significant capital outlay in lean times, but it was hoped it would be offset by a £300 annual reduction in the gritting bill.

Work to lift the tramway and granite setts of the old road surface commenced in January 1959 with installation of The Blanket beginning on 22nd September. Progress was swift and the system was ready for commissioning by mid-December, a short ceremony being held on the 17th to mark the occasion. Bailie Bruce Russell, chairman of the Corporation’s Works Committee, threw an oversized, novelty switch on a temporary kiosk on The Mound to energise the substation, remarking that it demonstrated the Corporation were “pioneers in this field“.

Those keen to see how (or if!) the expense might prove worthwhile did not have long to wait. A cold snap hit the city on 18th January 1960 and proved to be the coldest since the treacherous winter of 1947. Blizzards swept across the east of Scotland and The Scotsman reported “chaos and crashes on the roads” across the country with 150 people hospitalised as a result in Dundee alone. The Blanket was run for two consecutive days and kept the road surface clear to such an extent that the same paper declared it had “triumphantly defied the winter’s first fierce onslaught” and that while some buses were “floundering and skidding all over the place in Morningside, others sailed serenely and steadily down the Mound”.

Despite the obvious success of its first winter of operation, the £300 reduction in the city’s gritting overhead was more than cancelled out by the Blanket’s electricity bill of £1,018; more than twice what had been anticipated! The City Engineer, Mr W. P. Haldane, remained positive however and told the Works Committee that this would be reduced significantly in future by the commissioning of an automatic controller that would only switch the system on when both the temperature dropped below zero and humidity was sufficient to allow ice to form. This concept was later commercialised by the Penicuik-based firm of Findlay, Irvine Ltd. as the Icelert.

For the first three years of its life The Blanket actually remained the property of the SSEB, not being handed formally over to the city until they were fully satisfied. A ceremony was held on 8th October 1962 when the key to the substation door was handed over by Mr C. H. A. Collins of the Board to the chairman of the city’s Works Committee with a small speech that declared it to be a complete success, one that had “contributed greatly to road safety in Edinburgh”. It would now face its ultimate test – the “Big Freeze” of 1963. During one of the coldest winters on record, from mid-December all the way through to early March, the Blanket was run for a total of over four hundred hours and kept the road free of snow and ice throughout.

Such was the interest generated in The Blanket that before shovels were even in the ground other institutions were already wondering if they too could benefit from some sort of subterranean heating. A few miles away at Murrayfield, the home of Scottish Rugby, the SRU realised that such a thing could be a real boon to them too and a significant improvement of their current frost-prevention method of covering the playing surface with tons of straw and erecting marquees heated by paraffin stoves over the pitch before winter games.

Once again the SSEB was keen to propose an electric solution and in stepped a benevolent Glaswegian distiller – Charles A. Hepburn – who put up £10,000 to install the first under-soil heating at a British rugby stadium. Again the equipment was provided by E. N. Bray and 39 miles of electric wire were laid 6 inches beneath the turf late in 1959, sufficient to keep the 6,000 tons of grass and soil from freezing. The system took only a week to lay using a specially adapted tractor that cut a channel, laid the cable and then covered it back over with turf all in one action.

The running costs to the SRU of £100 a day were not cheap, but were less than the old methods and in the bitter 1963 season it more than proved its worth. There were twelve consecutive weeks when all rugby games in Scotland were cancelled – all except those at Murrayfield, where play continued uninterrupted. As a measure of how cold it had been, the frost was so severe that it caused £10,000 in damage to the concrete terracing of the stadium! The other national theatre of sport – Hampden Park – would not get a “blanket” until 1979.

The success of Edinburgh’s Blankets compelled one Scotsman reader to pen a verse in their honour:

Now may the Lord be thankit
For my electric blanket:
We’re a’ as pleased as can be,
The Mound and Murrayfield,
AND ME.

The installation at The Mound was expected to last twenty years, but at aged just fifteen already there several sub-surface breakages which had proved uneconomical to repair. The only realistic option for refurbishment was lifting and relaying the entire carriageway for which there was no political or economic appetite. With little ceremony therefore in April 1975 it was announced by the Corporation’s Highways and Road Safety Committee that the system was to be abandoned. Coincidentally, less than a month later, on May 16th, Corporation of The City and Royal Burgh of Edinburgh also found itself redundant, replaced by a two-tier system of local government. Roads and highways were now the responsibility of the new Lothian Regional Council who were now responsible for keeping The Mound free of snow and ice by old-fashioned gritting.

Being laid under turf and with nothing heavier than the forwards of the First Fifteen pressing down upon it, the system at Murrayfield was less prone to breakage and easier to repair and it lasted in use until 1991 when increasing maintenance costs saw it replaced during the reconstruction of the stadium.

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