Return of the Mac's ?

by Nick Drew | Mon 22 Jan 2018

Return of the Mac's ?

Among the many threads I read recently on Linkedin about the collapse of Carillion, one contributor suggested that maybe we could see a re-launch of this country’s best ever muckshifting and roadbuilding firm McAlpine’s which sadly was gobbled up by Carillion in 2007.

Whilst I’m sure many of us would love to see a return of McAlpine I cannot see it happening any time soon. The men and women that used to work for “Macs” were a special breed, who knew the job inside out, the likes of whom we will probably never see again. This topic got me thinking about once again sharing some old McAlpine photos that were lent to me by longstanding plant man Luke Harris. Luke worked on the construction of Roadford Reservoir in the late 1980’s, the job involved a considerable amount of excavation and earthmoving works which was tackled by Alfred McAlpine, who in familiar style amassed a vast amount of kit to assault the job with, including this Caterpillar 245 in face shovel mode.

The job involved the formation of a large rockfall embankment which would form the dam, which would eventually impound water from the River Wolf to form a reservoir with an impressive net storage capacity of 34,500 megalitres (around 8 billion gallons).

The rock was transferred to the embankment area by a fleet of Caterpillar articulated dumptrucks and pushed out by a Komatsu D155 dozer.

Compacting the rock and stone on the dam embankment itself presented additional problems, but McAlpine’s came up with a solution of using two dozers and a winch system to propel a vibratory roller up and down the face of the dam.

I was only lucky enough to work on hire to McAlpine once when a 2 week hire developed into 8 months down on the A30 improvement works in Cornwall. It was long hours and invariably 7 days a week, but I got to work with some proper legends on that job and it was mostly an enjoyable experience.

With the big projects like HS2 coming down the line, somebody has to take on the jobs and it will be interesting to see who steps up to the plate over the coming months.

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