Wednesday 30 March 2011

Just the Pill Gill!






Good morning all you lovely people


Here are some photo's of the northern end taken last weekend by my work colleague Gill, including a reall nice one of the old A3 as we know it.


Many many thanks to Gill for bravley venturing out in the sun!


A few of you have asked me about the booking website for the walkthrough event in may. As soon as it is live I shall post a link on here so keep your eyes peeled!


keep on diggin.............

10 comments:

Mo said...

Hi, Thanks for the pics and updates.

Do you know when the completion date is? I have been following developments closely. I heard May 14th, but BBC site seems to say late in August. Also, going be average journey times, do you have a guess at roughly how many minutes the tunnel will reduce on a journey say from Portsmouth to Guilford. Are we talking a 2 or 3 minutes or 10-20 minutes?

Thanks

Anonymous said...

Hope when they open it they do something special like have an F1 team drive through, rather than the usual boring ribbon cutting by some Z list celeb or mayor.

Mad Archer said...

The Highways Agency site on the project has a Timetable. This now reads 'Open new A3 - July' It used to just say 'Planned'

Anonymous said...

When there's no traffic it takes 6 minutes to drive from the start of the roadworks to the end (so the time saving with no traffic will be about 3 minutes). However with traffic it can take 40 minutes!

gummybear said...

The tunnel will reduce the journey time because the average speed you will be doing overall will be faster. Also you wont have to slow down and stop at Hindhead. I guess we wont know for certain until it opens!

An F1 car would be awesome but if it was one of the English teams it would probably just breakdown! haha

I think it is going to be amazing and that everyone that has complained or moaned about it will actually stand back and go wow this is much better. It's just a magnificent piece of engineering and geophysically easy on the eye!

Cybot said...

Gummybear, I think you'll find the last three world championships winning cars were English so not many breakdowns there.

gummybear said...

Cybot,

you got me on that one! haha mind you were they not followed round by an RAC truck? hehe

We should get lewis and Jenson to race each other through it, one of them go through the southern bore and the other through the northern bore and see who gets to Hazle Grove 1st!

Mo said...

Thanks for the information. I would be over the moon if it reduced journey times by 15 - 20 minutes!

Mike H said...

I reckon it will speed up times by about 3-4 mins over clear. I guess the way to do it is imaging the electronic signs always, always say "Time to Hindhead: 3 mins" - it should be like that all all times.

The big question is whether the removal of the Hindhead bottleneck will mean the Guildford bottleneck (caused by the combination of 50mph restriction and Hog's Back traffic) gets even worse.

It'll save me about 15-20 minutes over the time I spend going from Liphook to Lindford and then back through Grayshott...

Re: the F1 teams, great idea (which could be tied to the Goodwood Festival of Speed, which would be on around the same time the tunnel opens) but would probably send the wrong message for a tunnel with 70mph average speed detectors!

Anonymous said...

The tunnel is much faster then going around. Even with the old 10mph speed limit it could save me 20-30 minutes of waiting in traffic.

Even with clear traffic it is noticeably quicker. Looking forward to trying it at some faster speeds!