London Practice
About 1838 Rendel dissolved his partnership with Beardmore at Plymouth, and settled in London, but still was chiefly employed on work for his native county. In 1841 he constructed the Millbay pier, Plymouth, a work of considerable difficulty owing to the depth of water in which it was built. Here he first introduced the method of construction since employed in Holyhead and Portland harbours. In 1839 he was engaged in preparing schemes for a railway between Exeter and Plymouth, running over Dartmoor. At the time sufficient funds could not be raised, but an alternative coast line was afterwards carried out by I. K. Brunel. In 1843 he made plans for docks at Birkenhead, which he defended before parliamentary committees against hostile local influence. The contest was long protracted, and the incessant labour served to shorten Rendel's life; his published evidence forms a valuable record of engineering practice of the period. In 1844-53 he constructed docks at Grimsby; in 1848-53 extensions of the docks at Leith; in 1850-53 docks at Garston on the Mersey, with extensions of the East and West India and the London docks. As constructor of the Grimsby docks he was one of the first to apply W. G. Armstrong's system of hydraulic machinery for working the lock gates, sluices, cranes, &c. For this work he received a grand medal of honour at the Paris Exhibition of 1855. For the admiralty he planned in 1845, and afterwards constructed, the packet and refuge harbour at Holyhead, and in 1847 he constructed the harbour of refuge at Portland. In the making of these great harbours he contrived, by means of elevated timber staging, to let down masses of stone vertically from railway trucks, and, by building up the masonry with unexampled rapidity to a point above sea level, contrived to reduce to comparative insignificance the force of the sea during building operations. As many as 24,000 tons (24 kt) of stone were deposited in one week. In 1850 he commenced making a new harbour at St. Peter Port, Guernsey.
Read more about this topic: James Meadows Rendel (engineer)
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