Unit four modern railways

Text A

Channel Tunnel

Ex. 1. Practice the reading of the words and phrases:

consortium, company, simultaneously, combine, removal, process, bury, alphanumeric, while, cubic, almost, chalk, excavate, diameter, passage, escape, during, emergency, underneath, containerized, society, wonder, regular;

unheard-of engineering challenge, unprecedented project, concrete liner.

Ex. 2. Practice the reading of the proper names.

• La Manche [lɑ:'mɑ:nʃ] – Ла-Манш (пролив)

• Paris ['pærɪs] – Париж

• Calais ['kæleɪ] – Кале (город, порт на севере Франции)

• Brussels ['brʌslz] – Брюссель (столица Бельгии)

• Catherine ['kæθərɪn] – Кэтрин

• Elizabeth [ɪ'lɪzəbəθ] – Элизабет

Ex. 3. To refresh your memory, translate the following words into Russian.

to accept	costs	to hold (a ceremony)	service
to allow	to declare	journey	several
coach	to employ	major	proposal
to connect	expensive	to separate	various

Ex. 4. Copy the following words and phrases and memorize their meanings.

to access – получать доступ average – средний challenge – сложная задача, проблема contractor – подрядчик prime contractor – генеральный подрядчик to dismantle – разбирать (машину), демонтировать (оборудование) emergency – аварийная ситуация, чрезвычайная ситуация in case of emergency – в случае необходимости to maintain – содержать в исправном тех.состоянии; эксплуатировать maintenance – содержание; эксплуатация maintenance work – техническое обслуживание; текущий ремонт to mean (meant, meant) – значит, означать means – способ средство means of transport – средство транспорта by means of – при помощи, посредством passage – переход reason – причина, повод shuttle train – челночный поезд to tunnel (= to bore a tunnel) – проходить (прокладывать) тоннель

Ex. 5. Read the sentences and translate them into Russian.

1. Nowadays the London Underground is the most popular means of city transport because it is cheap, convenient, quick and safe.

2. The maintenance cost of a diesel loco is three times greater than that of an electric loco.

3. They decided to dismantle the machine and start again from scratch (=from the very beginning).

4. The Shuttle is a train that carries cars and their passengers through the Channel Tunnel between England and France. A typical passenger shuttle train consists of twenty-six wagons. A half of them are double-deck carriages for carrying cars of average size.

5. A contractor is a person or company that agrees to do work or provide goods for another company.

6. Workers are carrying out necessary maintenance work on the main line to Cambridge.

7. The engines shut off automatically in an emergency.

8. A tunnel is a passage built underground, for example to allow a road or railway to go through a hill, under a river, etc.

9. Special drilling equipment is being used to tunnel under the sea bed.

10. For many years, railway track has been laid and maintained by hard manual labor. Now this work is being done by means of up-to-date track machines and mechanisms.

11. The inter-car gangways (переход) invented in about 1880 enabled passengers and train crew to access from one part of the train to the other and so made possible the introduction of the dining car.

12. The main reasons for the accident were the poor condition of the track and exceeding the speed limit.

13. The high-speed train running between Hiroshima and Kokura was entered in the Guinness Book of Records for the highest average speed – 261.8 km/h.

14. A long tunnel was bored through the mountain but laying railway tracks in this tunnel wasn’t planned.

15. The train derailment would not have taken place if the track had been maintained properly.

Ex. 7. Read the sentences, replacing the Russian words with their English equivalents.

1. Can anyone explain the причина for the train delay?

2. Before a technician демонтировать the explosive device, a nearby restaurant, a post office and City Hall had been evacuated.

3. The railway became самое важное средство транспорта thanks to изобретение паровоза.

4. The Highways Department is responsible for the construction and cодержание в технически исправном состоянии of bridges and roads.

5. A челнок is a plane, bus, or train that makes regular short поездки between two places.

6. В случае необходимости, press the alarm button.

7. The dispatcher can communicate with the loco driver over long distances посредством a radiotelephone.

8. The task of the путевая бригада is to содержать the railway путь in good состояние.

9. In 1981, French National Railways began running TGV between Paris and Lyon at средний speeds of about 270 km/h on маршруты specially built for this service.

10. The word "transport" or "transportation" означать “to carry people or goods from place to place”.

Ex. 7. Complete the sentences with a required word from the list.

Then, for no apparent ___, the train suddenly stopped. The government has declared a state of ___ following the earthquake. The contract defines the apportionment (пропорциональное распределение) of risks between employer and ___. A car is quite a big expense, especially when you consider ___. Destruction of the environment is one of the most serious ___ we face. The ___ citizen in the developed countries uses over 155kg of paper per year. We walked down a narrow ___ to the back of the building. A railway is divided into sections, usually four or six miles in length and each section is ___ by a section gang (путевая бригада). In the U.S., railroads became the dominant ___ in the last half of the 19th century. The engine has to be ___ to repair the damage. If the tunnel were ___, the railroad would be 30 km shorter. The cost of transporting passengers and goods can be reduced ___ increasing the length and weight of trains.

average bored by means of challenges contractor dismantled emergency maintained maintenance means of land transport passage reason

Ex. 8. Match the words and phrases in column A with their Russian equivalents in column B.

A	B
at regular intervals	груз, перевозимый в контейнерах
civil engineer	обслуживающий персонал
containerized freight	служебный (технический) тоннель
depth	инженер-строитель
engineering	одновременно
escape	через равные промежутки
maintenance workers	спасение, эвакуация
service tunnel	осуществлять проект
simultaneously	буровая тoннелепроходческая машина
to accomplish a project	копать, рыть, вынимать грунт
to excavate	глубина
tunnel boring machine	технический

Ex. 9. Complete the sentences with a required word or phrase from exercise 8.

1. The speed of tunneling was considerably raised by using up-to-date ___.

2. The inauguration of the Channel Tunnel was broadcast ___ on television and radio.

3. Archaeologists are ___ a Bronze Age settlement on the outskirts of the village.

4. Signaling devices are installed ___ along the whole railway to provide the safety of traffic.

5. Travel can be an ___ from the routine drudgery of life.

6. Steven has an ___ brain and his father means him to be an engineer.

7. The main tunnel, through which shuttle trains travel, is 50 km long and runs from Folkestone, England, to Calais, France, at an average ___ of 40 m below the sea bed.

8. The Channel Tunnel consists of two rail tunnels and a central ___ used for ventilation, maintenance, and emergency ___. There is a roadway inside the service tunnel, so ___ and emergency teams can reach any point of the Tunnel system in their road vehicles.

9. A very large amount of gravel was ___ to form the channel.

10. There are various kinds of ___ but if the size and character of freight are not proper for containers, the traditional cars such as box cars, hopper cars, tank cars, etc. are used.

11. According the contract, the project to refurbish the out-of-date wagon fleet is to be ___ by Siemens in 3 years.

12. Up to twenty users can have access to the system ___.

13. A ___ is an engineer who designs and maintains roads, bridges, dams, and similar structures.

Ex. 10. Translate the italicized words and their equivalents.

conventional – usual truck – lorry van – small covered truck railcar – railway car

to reject – not to accept to realize – to accomplish rate – speed

Ex. 11. Read the sentences and translate them, paying attention to the italicized words.

1. A van is a vehicle used especially for carrying goods, which is smaller than a truck and has a roof and usually no windows at the sides.

2. The car and the van collided head-on in thick fog.

3. An unusual 32-feet paper bridge was built across a narrow canyon in Nevada. For testing it, the engineers chose a truck, which weighted 12,000 lb (pounds). This truck drove quite safely across the paper bridge.

4. The development of the high-speed TGV (Train à Grande Vitesse) has led to the construction of several new lines and increased the rate of rail passenger traffic. TGV can travel at speeds up to 320 km/h on specially built track, but the trains must travel much slower on conventional track. The high-speed TGV travels between Paris and Lyon in only 2 hours, compared with 4 hours for conventional service.

5. The German state of North Rhine-Westphalia has rejected a Euros 3.2 billion project to build a 79km maglev line between Düsseldorf and Dortmund in favor of a conventional rail project called MetroExpress S-Bahn.

6. In the 1830s, much was spoken about the necessity of constructing the Moscow-St.Petersburg mainline. Various projects were proposed by Pravdin, Safonov, Muravjov, Abaza, but all of them were rejected.

7. The idea of connecting the Isles of Great Britain to mainland Europe by means of a long suspension bridge was rejected and the proposed project was not realized.

8. Unlike conventional trains, the turbo train does not have a separate locomotive; its turbine power unit is small enough to be built into a passenger railcar.

9. In the U.S., modern passenger railcars are usually 85 feet long. In continental Europe, the standard length of railcars for conventional locomotive-hauled main-line service is now 86 feet 7 inches, but the cars of some high-speed train-sets are shorter.

10. Rates of the Trans-Siberian Mainline construction were very fast despite the fact that the railroad went through swamps, thick taiga, crossed major rivers and huge mountains.

Ex. 12. Before reading the text, make sure you know the following words and phrases:

seabed – морское дно to drill – бурить soil – грунт

to shore up – поддерживать, укреплять concrete liner – бетонный тюбинг material removal – удаление грунта