 Hello, everyone, and welcome to the 10 a.m. to 10 30 a.m. session of the 2019 Open Simulator Community Conference. In this session, we are happy to introduce the presentation, which is called Going Underground, Wapping Tunnel in OpenSim, and our speaker is Graham Mills. Please check out the website at conference.opensimulator.org for speaker bios, details of our sessions, and the full scheduled events. Now a little background for you. Graham Mills is a retired university academic with an amateur interest in the history of Liverpool and its Railways. He used OpenSim as an aid to better understanding issues of place and scale within historical context. This talk will examine the potential and problems in using OpenSim to model the construction and operation of the landmark two-kilometer Wapping Tunnel. For more information, please see his website HTTP colon slash slash build to understand dot ten centuries dot org. Let me go ahead and paste it into the local chat for you to have as well. This session is being live streamed and recorded. So if you have questions or comments during the session, you may send tweets to at OpenSim CC with the hashtag PoundOSCC19. Welcome, everyone. And let's begin the session. Hello. Can everybody hear me? OK. I'm delighted to be here again. I'm going to be talking to you about the Wapping Tunnel, which is amazingly Hang on. Excuse me a moment whilst I try and restart my Speak Easy. OK. I'm going to have to do without Speak Easy. I'm afraid the Wapping Tunnel is, as you can see, a rather small tunnel. It runs under the city of Liverpool. It is the western end of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway, which was opened in 1830. And it was the railway was primarily designed so that they could move materials as quickly as possible between Liverpool and Manchester, especially cotton. So all the cotton from the United States traveled over to Liverpool and went through this tunnel and on the railway to Manchester, where it was turned into textiles and then returned back to the docks at Liverpool and shipped across the world. The Wapping Tunnel was a large tunnel. It was some 1.26 miles or two kilometres and a major undertaking for engineers at that time. It went under the city largely because they wanted to keep trains off the roads. The gradient that down from the hill where the entrance to the tunnel was located, a place called Edge Hill, was too steep for the locomotives they had at the time. So instead they used stationary engines in a special place called the Moorish Arch and these powered a rope hold system to move the trains up and down. So this is what I'm interested in. A lot of the information that we have comes from artwork which you can see here. So up at Edge Hill at the top right there you can see that Moorish Arch and either side, those buildings contain the stationary engines that power the rope system that you can see down the centre of the railway tracks. And the Wapping Tunnel was the central one of three tunnels at the end of the cutting. So if you swap around as it were, 180 degrees you're now looking down towards Liverpool and if we swap over you can see the tunnel just down towards the end where it approaches Wapping down by the docks in the centre of Liverpool and the trains emerge from there and run under the warehouse and the goods are lifted up into the warehouse. So this is the system that we're attempting to understand a little as to how it was built and how it was operated. The tunnel is still there, so there are three tunnels. You can't actually see the Wapping Tunnel, it's in the middle there. And you can see that this area which was formerly a really special place has been allowed somewhat to go back to nature as it were. Very, very sadly because in terms of world history this is actually a tremendously significant place. This is where the first railway from Liverpool to Manchester started to operate. Trains would meet and join with their locomotives here and set off 30 miles down the track. Back in the 1830s however, it looked much more like this. There was this Moorish Arch, now we're looking at it from the other side down towards the Wapping Tunnel as we've said in the middle and you can see down the middle of the tracks that rope system powered by the steam engines located in those two side engine houses and exhausted via the two chimneys which you can just about see above the tunnels. The construction of the railway is rather poorly understood. Here we can see the actual Wapping Tunnel, the central one of the three being constructed. You can see above the cutting the horse engine or gin as it was called which was used to do all the heavy lifting so there was no steam power actually involved in construction. Horses were very deeply involved in construction. Equally so were humans and you can see that the stone that was extracted was dressed by masons and sold commercially and you can see this activity going off down to the bottom right. The actual portal that you can see which is being constructed below that you can see two lines of narrow gauge railway and the narrow gauge railway was used during construction and provided by the railway for use by contractors. The information that we have about the railway is relatively and particularly the construction of the tunnel is relatively limited. What we do know is derived in significant part from this profile which was only available to me at least earlier this year and this is an implementation of a section by a very famous engineer called Thomas Telford who compiled a report on the railway and this shows just part of the section that he used for his report and it shows the location of the borings which are shown in red and the air shafts which are shown in blue and you can see Edge Hill is at the right here and whopping down on the left and what's nice about working in OpenSim is that you can use it to merge different data sources so here for example I've superimposed this on a contemporary map drawn from 1836 so we can see not only the profile which is exaggerated in the vertical scale but we can see how it relates to the actual location and you can see for example how the tunnel in one place reaches virtually to the surface and this is actually a quarry called Yellow Delve and people could actually walk into the tunnel from that particular location and here you can see the position of Yellow Delve on the track of the tunnel which goes under the city of Liverpool and down to the docks Edge Hill at the top there down to whopping at the bottom there are still signs although the tunnel is still there there are relatively few signs now on the surface we can see that there is an event added much much later on the surface at Crown Street and that's in the picture on the right there the way in which the tunnel was constructed was by means of a series of eyes and these were the shafts that were used to transport workers and return materials into the tunnel during construction so you can see the Crown Street site here with the ventilation tower in a very rough model from open so people would go down using a horse gin and then along a little corridor and work into the tunnel and expand out from there in both directions so there are a number of these different eyes all the way along the tunnel now the traditional way of tunneling was to make pilot tunnels or headings and these were relatively small tunnels very cramped and airless conditions that would be expanded basically just to make sure they meet up with adjacent tunnels being built from the opposite eyes in the case of the whopping tunnel this may not have been done and what I've attempted to do here is actually simulate the tunneling activity using a link set if you look down you can see that basically what I've done is created a big link set of about I don't know 400 prims or thereabouts just a single script operating this and as you click on the end of the prim so it retreats back into the tunnel giving the simulation of actual tunneling what seems likely in the case of the whopping tunnel is that they were actually extracting the stone for commercial use in the middle of this growing city of Liverpool and as a consequence it was a slower process of actually extending the tunnel and they used stone as a platform also for roofing the tunnel adding brickwork and so forth by 1829 the tunnel was complete and in fact opened to the public briefly before the railway itself opened and this just gives you an impression of what the tunnel may have looked like when it was illuminated by gas for early visitors they actually had to double the number of gas lights in between the different openings as they found that people couldn't find their way around they also whitewashed the sides of the tunnel in order to improve the visibility so moving down now to the station itself at whopping you can see the little red rectangle there that's where the trains emerge they only have their break wagon with them they descend under gravity and they go under that warehouse that you can see in the red rectangle and this is all that remains at the far end at whopping this is the original tunnel portal which is still present and this is how it looked back in 1830 so this was the whopping good station so at the top left there we can see the tunnel portal as it would have been and we're looking at it from underneath that warehouse right we are looking now from the tunnel portal along the length of what was originally a ropework so it's a very long elongated station and at the bottom we're looking all the way back at the warehouse and we have a little good station there which was used for goods being prepared for transport to Manchester goods that would come down originally from Manchester would be stored in the warehouse would be lifted off the wagons by a hoist and off the side of the warehouse which you can't see terribly well there were additional hoists which were used to deliver the goods onto waiting horse drawn carts so the trains about to go back to Manchester would be drawn up the tunnel by means of that rope haulage system that I mentioned previously so in outline that's the story of the whopping tunnel not well known but a very important historical artifact which still survives under the city of Liverpool it's in places unfortunately flooded so you can't get all the way through from one end to the other but there is a lot of interest in making at least parts of it available for visiting during the forthcoming bicentenary which of course will be in 2029 and of course the opening of the railway itself in 2030 so there's a lot of interest at the moment in trying to understand the way in which the railway was constructed and the way in which it operated with a view to making that information available to others so that's my talk thank you very much for listening if you have any questions I'm happy to answer them let's see if we have any questions in local chat and thanks by the way Lear Lobo for typing his stuff up that really makes it easier for folks to see what he was talking about I appreciate your assistance with that yeah my apologies I have speak easy here as well but unfortunately it gave up when will you be at the poster booth in expo zone 3 is there a good time if they want to stop by and talk with you is there a particular break coming up we have to look at the schedule there's a break that comes up at 3pm a half hour break there between 3 and 3.30pm oh well I'll be there at that time then so if you want to stop by and talk with him and if you have some additional things you want to ask that would be a good time as well yes Koakura I do talk about the same thing every year but slightly different perspectives hopefully and you can see that basically the thing is building incrementally indeed as we go does it ever flood yes it does flood it flooded very early on actually and they had also terrible trouble right near the where it emerged that whopping simply because it goes very close underneath some houses so it actually cut off some wells and some houses actually subsided as a consequence the build isn't visitable I'm afraid this actually gives a rather false impression of what the build is if the build is a lot of small builds if anybody's really interested I can probably put something together I have a huge number of small little bits that are not necessarily all connected you'd appreciate that making a build one and a half miles long is quite challenging sorry for open sim well it is for my facilities anyway if I had one thing that I would really love of course in this context it would be able to be able to tunnel properly in open sim and then we could have even more fun but maybe one day well if you ever want to do it in Unity there's ways to bring it in there and there are tunneling tools now there that can even be used at runtime indeed alright well thank you thank you very much well thank you Grant Mills for a terrific presentation there as a reminder to our audience you can see what's coming up on the conference schedule at conference.opensimulator.org following this session our next session will be at 10.30 a.m. in this same keynote region and it's entitled Pilgrims at Virtual Harmony also we encourage you to visit the OSCC 19 poster Expo in the OSCC Expo 3 region to find accompanying information on presentations and to explore the hyper grid tour resources in the OSCC Expo 2 region along with the sponsor and crowd funder booths located throughout all of the OSCC Expo regions