its bloody good while it lasts though

Are you having a laugh!!! Before I go on I am a Brit living in Sydney.
The reason why the AUD has strengthen so much over the last three years is due to China. The resources sector over here are feeding China's never ending energy and raw material needs. In fact, I know of two things for certain as colleagues are in the know and work with clients in these sectors.

- The mining companies can not extract the raw material fast enough to meet China's demand.
- If you go to the Central coast (100km north of Sydney) you will see the longest cargo ship queue in the world (visable from google earth aswell. These are all empty Chinese cargo/coal ships waiting to go into Newcastle for their load. Newcastle Ports just can not fill up the damned things fast enough!! This is the same of all Ports around Australia.

In addition to this the reserve bank of Australia have kept interest rates low, and have historically not encouraged a debt society. Together with exports remaining high due to the growth of China this ensured that Aus did not go into reccession, and suffice to say that the Australian Dollar is now a major player in the world banking due to the strength of it.

When I got here in 2006, it was 3.04GBP to the dollar. Now it is 1.54, and I am loving sending all my spare AUD's back to pay off my UK motgage with my place in London. It is free money!!!

damn you.....

As the original photographs of the site were in sepia its about time.



Any new grounds in our sport are welcome and will look good when on TV. Hopefully they can find a way of filling the the stadium.

...and it is not yet definitely going to be built... it has taken a big leap but now they need to get planning on Wheldon Road for a Superstore!

Ooooh. Touchy. Are you one of these new fangled graduates who builds out of a book?

If we want to wave our construction cocks in the air then fine, lets get em out. I've been at it 22 years and worked on 3 stadia projects previously, tendered works on another couple and every one had the piling, groundworks, steel, terrace, cladding sequence following each other on each stand running consectivly and concurrently. We even had more than one big crane you know. Some of them had 2 or 3 100 tonne mobiles, on top of the boys toys and cherry pickers that get put away at night with Rolly Lofty and Scoop.

That stand looks like its steelwork is 95% complete, great progress. Whats the erectors doing now? Steel erectors don't want to be messing about with precast units, netting, and cladding. Yon mon before makes it sound like there's the same 6 blokes building the lot in sequence. You will know full well they fetch different subbies in for different tasks, the precast suppliers often carry out design and fix, the cladders are often different to the erectors, the netters will be someone else. Steel erectors want tonnage and the tonnage in that stand was completed weeks ago.

I'm sure if they tried they could build more than one at once, like Hull, Wire, Darlington, Shrewsbury, Leigh (I wont bore you why the Reebok had to be done like that)...especially as your groundworkers have been on there since December! 4 months later there is only steel in one of the stands. Thats 16 weeks. Hull was at PC within 48. When you're hammering it the groundworkers should be on GL20, erectors right up their backsides on GL15, precast on GL10, cladders on GL5, netters on 1.

If you can only build it one stand at once, fair enough, there may be good reason for it, but don't go all girly when someone points it out.

Oh and while I'm at it, orange bunting and road pins is not suitable edge protection to excavations (which must be deep because there is a bloody ladder needed to get into them which is not fix and tied I might add) and would get condemned on one of my jobs.

No, he's a bricklayer. True story.

Good memory! Actually im a site agent now after 3 years of Uni and lots and lots of courses.

Good for you pal (seriously, not trying to be funny on this occasion!).

I get what your saying pal, but not every stadium is built in a 1, 2, 3, sequance like youv'e said Hull and Leigh's were, theres different ways of doing the job. By the looks of it Buckinghams have took a leaf out of the German construction industry's book by fixing whole steel uprights with roof trusses conected along with concrete terracing going in all at once in a precast section method.

The way most stadiums are built are like you have said, steel structure 1. concrete terracing 2. roof erection 3. followed by cladding, then fitting the stadium out with changing rooms, toilets ect. Everything else follows, if you ever saw Beyern Munich's new stadium (which i did a presentation on for Uni) under construction you'll see they did the same as salfords, steel structure terrace and roof done all at the same time in a precast factory matufactured pod, then they followed it round the whole stadium in sections and by the time the stadium steel work was completed half the stadium already had seating fitted. Like i say different companys have different methods.

Another thing with the Reds stadium is its to be built in phase's the main west stand which is the one that you see up now is at its full phase the others are all at phase one, so in context the extra foundations that are there for the extentions in phase 2 will have to be buried. So its common sense really Buckinhams are getting the phase one build out the way then they'll concentrate on the other smaller phase 1 stands, which i can tell you will be started mid to late next week, and will take half the time of the west stand to erect and finish.

Smiffs?