Original subtitles

In this episode,

the world's urban railroads,

the unique challenges of laying tracks in the city...

To do 2,500 blasts under grand central

required a lot of coordination

to make sure that we didn't disturb anything above.

And the ingenious solutions...

This port is just such an impressive operation,

and the whole thing is running on rails.

Without the cable cars, it would be really difficult

to get around.

To make the impossible possible.

Captions by Vitac... www.Vitac.com

captions paid for by discovery communications

despite being able to weave their way across the planet,

covering colossal distances on cross-continental journeys,

trains are in a league of their own

when serving the world's cities.

Many of our busiest metropolises thrive

on the existence of the railroad,

transporting the population on its daily commute,

getting goods to market, and visitors to great landmarks.

But the urban environment poses some remarkable challenges

for railroad engineers, from grueling inclines...

You can see the challenges that are faced,

and you can see the undulating territory

and how steep these hills are.

To keeping supply on par with demand...

Our biggest challenge is the new generation of vessels.

It is one challenge to work the vessel,

other challenge to get them into the hinterland.

And delivering vital services.

The post office was gonna have to find a faster

and more efficient way to get that mail around town

if the capital was gonna stay connected.

And it's one such seemingly impossible challenge

that has been facing engineers in New York for decades.

New York City, a Metropolis that relies heavily on its railroads.

With around 90 million passengers a year

traveling westward from long island

to the heart of the city, Manhattan,

the busiest commuter line in the us is desperately overstretched.

To relieve the strain, engineers and construction workers

are at work in the central hub of the city's rail network.

Although few passersby would even notice.

We're here in the heart of grand central terminal.

This is where hundreds of thousands of passengers a day

come through to take the trains.

Mike Pujdak is part of a team working in near secret

to solve New York's commuter problems.

Given how packed and congested midtown Manhattan is,

we have to work like a stealth project.

All of our materials and all of our equipment still,

to this day, has to come in from queens and the Bronx

to feed this job.

Despite the challenges, the city's nonstop transit system

is operating undisturbed.

It's remarkable that hundreds of thousands

of tourists and commuters come into grand central

every day into this iconic structure

and don't have any idea of the magnitude of the construction

that's going on right below their feet.

The east side access project,

with ambitions to completely transform

the transit network in New York.

It's an undertaking on a truly grand scale.

This is one of the largest infrastructure projects

ongoing in the us right now.

This is incredibly important for New York.

This project is $11.1 billion,

and we have, right now, currently,

about 1,600 people working on it.

And at one point, we peaked out at 2,600 people

a day working on this project.

Connecting one of the world's

largest railroad commuter stations

with the busiest commuter railroad in the us

via more than 7 miles of tunnel,

east side access will carry trains

along a network of new and refurbished tunnels

into a four-platform, eight-track terminal directly

under grand central terminal and park Avenue.

It's a giant space that must be constructed from scratch.

And that's easier said than done when you're operating

under some of the most expensive real estate on the planet.

So, we're in the east side access caverns here,

and we're 150 feet below park Avenue

and grand central terminal.

If you don't carefully plan what you got to do down here,

you will wind up creating a situation

where you could disturb the ground

'cause you could influence some of the structures above.

With the consequences of any errors

adding to a potentially multi-billion-dollar disruption,

it's a scenario that had to be avoided at all costs.

We could not interrupt this economic area

and the traveling public coming into grand central,

'cause that's a lifeline for the economy in this area.

To create this vast underground terminal, Mike and his team

utilized an appropriately awe-inspiring solution.

Fire in the hole!

Just to set the stage here, this is all Manhattan bedrock.

There was nothing here.

And then we used drill blast methods

to basically carve out the balance of the structure.

It's controlled blasting,

so you basically calculate the amount of powder

you're gonna use to control how much rock you want to remove,

and then you measure the vibrations,

so that way, you don't impose any issues to the buildings

and the structures above.

When finally excavated, this space was 1,150 feet long,

which is larger than the Chrysler building is tall,

and it was 60 foot high by 60 foot wide,

and we have two caverns.

I mean, to do 2,500 blasts under grand central

and not impact them

required a lot of coordination with Metro north.

Work on this supersized city railroad

began in 2007 with the launch of a pair

of giant tunnel boring machines under Manhattan.

Using powerful cutting heads to burrow

through the layers of dense rock,

the tunnel boring machines

were set on course towards grand central.

As tunnel engineer Jeff rice recalls,

operating in the heart of New York caused complications.

If we were in a burgeoning city somewhere

where there wasn't already an overfilled Penn station

and a historic grand central in the way,

a completely developed Manhattan,

heavily traveled train-traffic areas within the project limits,

the project would've been much simpler.

The huge volumes of rock and debris generated

by the tunneling process made removing it

a challenging logistical dilemma.

Since we couldn't bring muck up through grand central

and it was not viable to bring it up

by train out of grand central, we needed to bring it out

where it could be handled for trucking.

With working out of the overcrowded center of Manhattan

out of the question, the team had no alternative

but to take the wreckage the long way around.

The rock removed from the tunnels

was then brought back entirely through the second tube

of the existing tunnel on a conveyor system out to queens.

The sheer volume of rock that was removed through

the length of all the tunnels, it's time-consuming.

Stretching for over 1.2 miles, the giant conveyor

fed out to a construction yard

where rubble was loaded onto trucks.

Thousands of tons of material was brought out.

The tunnel has become pretty much a highway

for all the resources in and out of the tunnel.

But one section of tunnel under queens

poses east side access' engineers

with a particularly tricky set of problems.

There you go.

With soft ground, a high water table,

and dense, active city infrastructure to contend with,

inspired engineering solutions are required.

What we're approaching is

one of the greatest challenges on the east side access project

is the northern boulevard crossing.

So, you can see northern boulevard at midday

is still a heavily traveled truck route.

Here comes a Astoria-line train on the elevated structure.

On top of the elevated structure at northern boulevard,

underneath northern boulevard is a five-track subway structure,

one of the heaviest traveled lines in all of New York City.

To get the trains for east side access to their destination,

the route must cross directly

below these three major transport links.

But the challenging ground conditions

leave only a small area of viable material

to tunnel through and little margin for error.

All the traditional methods, and particularly methods

that were tried and true here in New York City

and in north America, in general, they met defeat.

We didn't want to do something innovative.

We had to do something innovative here.

With just under 10 feet of soil between the subway

and the new tunnel,

the engineering required to solve this problem

had to be bold.

This is one of... It's not necessarily the first,

but this was the first time for a tunnel in north America

where we're able to horizontally freeze the ground.

Freeze pipes basically carried tubes that ran back

and forth to a freeze plant.

The freeze plant used a chilled brine to pump the chilled brine

through all of the pipes individually

and freeze the ground slowly.

Creating this frozen layer of earth

helped to strengthen the ground

sufficiently to tunnel in safety.

The frozen arch performed better than we expected.

That provided the initial support to allow us

to actually perform our sequential tunneling.

It's very high stakes, but in the end,

it was a very big success and very proud of it.

Work to complete this railroad is ongoing,

but east side access will also need to be able

to handle a horde of New York commuters.

Moving thousands of people from the train tunnels

below up to ground level

would take an engineering solution on an epic scale.

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New York's east side access project

will increase city access for thousands of commuters.

It will also drop them off in the heart of Manhattan

around 15 floors below ground level.

In a peak timeframe when this job is running,

long island railroad plans to move 24 trains

an hour into the terminal,

and that's adding a lot more people down below,

150 feet below park Avenue,

to have to get out to the street.

And with that, that'll be 160,000 people

that have to be moved,

and we needed to figure out a way to do that.

The answer, as with all things on this impressive

urban project, is on an enormous scale.

We have 17 high-rise escalators altogether

that will head down to the caverns below.

They're 90-foot-high escalators, and when they're completed,

they'll be the longest escalators in New York City

and some of the longest in the country.

At 150 foot run, these are some massive escalators

that are being constructed here to connect the concourse

with the caverns down below.

Right now, we're rigging in one of the truss sections

so that the escalator comes and putting it on the incline,

and then they'll bolt it up together,

and then they'll install the next one.

You're working on a 30-degree slope,

so everything's cabled back and winched back,

and they use a whole bunch of chain falls

to lower these things safely into place

so they can interlock them and go to the next unit.

Huge volumes of passengers are expected to flow

into the new terminal each day,

so the efficient movement of people

will be essential to the project's success.

We're heavily relying on passenger flow

utilizing these banks of escalators.

These are what'll be the main feed

of bringing everybody up from the caverns

or down to the caverns up to the concourse level,

to the street, and into grand central proper itself.

But simply getting these giant escalators

belowground has been a challenge in itself.

The contractor has no access from Manhattan

to build out this job, which is kind of unique.

We couldn't come into the middle of 42nd street in midtown

and just start taking out and doing an open cut.

We had to bring in everything from a remote area, from Bronx,

on work trains just to access this.

It's another epic achievement in a project

that, once complete,

will stand amongst the most impressive feats of urban

railroad infrastructure anywhere on the planet.

Everything on this job is larger than life.

The tunnels are more difficult than the usual tunnel.

The soil conditions have been more difficult.

And despite all the obstacles,

the goal is to unveil east side access

to the commuters of New York in 2022.

When this is done, we're going to greatly improve

the access to New York City for riders from long island.

And it is a significant achievement.

Thanks to the hard work of Jeff, Mike, and many more like them,

the city will soon be able

to rely on another impossible railroad.

Well, it's personally rewarding to work on a project this long

and know that it's gonna be around for generations to come

and really change the infrastructure in Manhattan.

Trains have to contend with all manner

of obstacles in cities.

Hey! Come on!

But when it comes to getting people from "a" to "b,"

inclines can feel like an incredible challenge.

Both man and beast can struggle to overcome slopes,

but trains can simply run out of steam.

In California, railroad engineers had to find a way

to keep a train running

on some of the steepest city inclines imaginable.

San Francisco, notorious for its hilly geography.

Historically, horse and cart were used to climb the streets.

But accidents were common and often fatal,

a daily challenge that local Ed Cobeen knows all too well.

Just imagine these streets being cobblestone

and with the fog or the dew or the mist or the rain.

When you get a wet cobblestone and how steep these hills are,

how would those horses be able to get up,

pulling a streetcar with people?

Clearly, an alternative mode of transport

that could confidently tackle the city's terrain was needed.

And the solution has since become

one of the most iconic urban railroads on the planet.

The San Francisco cable car.

Standing alongside the golden gate bridge

as a symbol for the city, cable cars have been running up

and down some of California's steepest streets since 1873.

And in the 100-plus years since its opening,

this remarkable railroad has been declared

a national historic landmark.

The cable car is a perfect fit for San Francisco.

It's an achievement that's thanks to the work

of inventor Andrew Hallidie.

And keeping his seemingly impossible railroad

moving depends on an impressive engineering operation.

Right now, we're in the cable car powerhouse.

This is the beating heart.

This is what operates the entire cable car system

that allows all the cars to move out on the street.

The cables range anywhere from 2 to 4 miles,

and they're all driven by these electric motors

that are 750 horsepower each.

And it's all being held with this cable.

Running at a constant speed of 9.5 miles per hour,

these huge cables travel out under the city streets

in a giant continual loop.

Once the cables leave the barn, there's a series of thousands

of pulleys underneath the street,

and the cable will ride on those pulleys

underneath the slot of the rail.

Remarkably, it's a system that works in the same way today

as it did more than a century ago.

Since the day it's been open,

we're still utilizing the same processes and techniques

that have been handed down for generation to generation

to the entire staff who's doing today

what somebody did over 140 years ago.

But those beautiful cars are about more than just appearance,

and the only way to appreciate

what it takes to overcome the hills is to take a ride.

Slide all the way down for me, folks.

Slide all the way down for me.

Ed's joining his fellow San Franciscans

as they climb one of the city's steepest streets.

The only way to move and/or stop the car

is by the actions of the gripmen.

He's got all the manual levers from a track brake

to a wheel a brake to his actual grip

that grabs onto the cable,

and that's what makes the car propel.

The grip works in much the same way as a vise.

When the lever is pulled back, a set of metal jaws,

or dies, close around the cable, gripping it tight.

And when the lever is pushed forwards, the cable is released.

It's the secret behind how the cars

can ascend San Francisco's hilly terrain.

So, right now, we're approaching Lombard street

on the famous Hyde hill.

This is the hill that's 21% grade.

This is the steepest route

that we have in the entire cable car system.

So, right now, what the grip operator is doing is,

he's pulling back on the grip,

and the dies are clamping onto the cable,

and that's what's propelling us up the hill.

But what does up must also come down.

And things get even more complicated

when a car approaches a crossing.

So, what's about to happen is,

we're gonna cross over Mason street.

So what he's doing here is letting go

so he can coast over the intersection

so we don't run into the other cable underground.

Let go too late and the operator could hit the cable

at the junction and cause an accident.

So, now we're coasting over the intersection.

But let go too soon and there won't be enough speed

to clear the crossing.

So now we've regripped the cable,

and we are back on our way.

But wear and the tear on the grip system is dramatic,

so how do engineers keep this brilliant mechanism

functioning over 100 years after its inception?

The grip system of San Francisco's cable cars

is essential for the railroad to operate around the city.

But the toll it takes on the equipment

means maintenance engineer Luis Carazo

is kept busy in the workshop.

This is like the engine,

the propulsion system for the car.

Without this thing, you're not going anywhere.

So you can see these dies are completely worn out.

I got to knock them out of the hinges

to put these new ones back in.

The grabbing and releasing,

grabbing and releasing the cable,

the cable just rubbing it all day long

and just tearing up the metal.

And without these regular repairs,

the grip could cause serious damage

to the system's other key component.

Got a cable car, 6 tons weight.

You remember, it's carrying 6 tons

plus the passengers in there.

Pretty heavy.

Right now, what I'm gonna do,

I'm gonna completely disassemble it.

For Luis, this is nearly nonstop work,

with a set of dies needing changing every

three or four days.

We got brand-new dies right here.

They're ready to put back on into the grip.

But without it, the cable cars simply couldn't function.

So, this work's definitely vital.

I can take it apart, put it together in the morning,

and by the afternoon, it could be worn out.

It's just a part of the cable car daily runnings.

We have to get it done.

Thanks to the work of Luis, and many more like him,

day after day, this iconic city railroad

keeps running up and down the streets of San Francisco,

defying all the odds.

I mean, if you look behind us and you can see

the hills and the grades that we have to deal with

and how steep everything is, the cable cars were designed

to be able to get through that treacherous terrain.

And there's little doubt that the cable car system

is one of the most incredible pieces of urban railroad

engineering ever constructed.

It still stands the test of time today.

140 years later, we're still operating on the hills.

There's no way I could ever understand or fathom

what the city would be like without it.

London, at the turn of the 20th century.

In just 100 years, England�s capital experienced

a rapid rise in its population,

growing from less than 1 million

to over 6.5 million.

Under the strain of this hasty expansion,

in a scenario similar to today's most congested cities,

getting around became a serious problem,

as physicist Andrew Steele is experiencing for himself.

In the early 1900s, London was one of the largest

and most populace urban areas in the world.

And just like today, congestion was a real problem.

You can easily imagine these vans being replaced

by horse-drawn carriages.

The problem is pretty much the same.

It's not about how many horsepower you've got

if you're just stuck in traffic like this.

Been in this car about 20 minutes,

and I don't think we've gone a mile.

This is why I cycle around town normally.

But it wasn't only commuters that were suffering

the consequences of the backed-up traffic.

London's postal service relied heavily on the roads.

But with mail coaches barely managing a crawl,

the deliveries were suffering severe delays.

In those days, one of the most important ways

to communicate was by post,

and with sorting offices spread across London,

the post office was gonna have to find a faster

and more efficient way to get that mail around town

if the capital was gonna stay connected.

Today, Andrew is en route to discover

how one pioneering railroad

helped keep the lines of communication flowing.

The solution the post office's engineers came up with

lies down here, 20 meters below the city's crowded streets.

In 1927, one of the most unique railroads

the world had ever seen launched.

Check this out.

This is what they came up with...

The London post office railway.

What an amazing contraption.

The world's first driverless electric railroad.

These miniature trains rode an underground network

of almost 22 miles of track

at speeds of up to 29 miles per hour,

serving eight stations and sorting offices.

For 3/4 of a century, it ran uninterrupted,

carrying up to 4 million letters a day,

and London hardly even knew this ingenious system existed.

This is so impressive.

I've lived in London for years,

and I had no idea that all this was down here,

let alone that it was still running in 2003,

delivering letters right across London.

This place is now just a tourist attraction,

but back in 1927 when it was opened,

it was a real engineering pioneer.

Allowing it to run for an astounding 22 hours a day,

delivering millions of letters all across London.

But constructing this urban railroad

and its labyrinth of tunnels was no small feat.

Built in the early 20th century,

well before modern tunnel-boring methods,

it would take an innovative engineering strategy

to get London's mail rail up and running.

Wow. What an amazing place to be.

We're going deeper underground,

and it's really quite cramped down here.

Imagine the workers excavating these tunnels.

It must've been grueling work

and also not a job for the claustrophobic.

Underground tunneling in London

was by no means a new concept in the early 1900s,

but the early work on tunnels for the tube network

had been an arduous and dangerous endeavor,

thanks to the challenging conditions.

The layer of soft Clay beneath London meant water

could seep in, potentially causing tunnels to collapse.

The post office were building over 20 meters

below the streets of London,

and so they needed this tunnel excavation

to be quick and efficient but, most importantly,

safe for the workers doing the excavating.

The innovative solution to this problem

came from one of tunneling's great pioneers,

James Greathead.

The solution the engineers used was called

the Greathead tunnel shield.

It worked a bit like this cookie cutter.

So, imagine I'm trying to build a tunnel

going towards you in this material here.

What we can do is place our tunnel shield in position,

shove it forward with a series of hydraulic rams,

and as this cutting edge dislodges material,

workers inside can excavate it, safely protected by the shield.

Then, as it moves forward a bit further,

we can start constructing the lining of the tunnel

behind the shield as it moves,

making the whole process fast and efficient,

and most importantly, safe for the workers,

who are protected inside here.

This groundbreaking technique

not only made it possible to build this railroad,

it also enabled the London underground to dig much deeper,

heralding the transformation of London's transport network.

It took three years to dig the tunnel system

for the post office railway.

Construction was halted when world war I broke out.

But in 1927, with the rails laid,

this innovative electric railroad

finally started operating.

However, London's postal system would encounter another problem,

one that threatened to derail the whole project.

The route between the stations was essentially a giant loop,

and as you can see, the corners can get pretty tight.

Now, in the original design of the trains, the wheel base...

So, the distance between the wheels... was about 2 meters.

So, just let me show you what that means

by getting out this tape measure.

You can see with this straight tape measure

laying on the curve,

it's just not following the track at all.

What that meant was that there was a lot of wear

and tear on the wheels, on the track itself,

and the worst-case scenario,

trains could get derailed, get stuck,

and that could stop the whole network entirely.

Now, a derailed train is really bad news for those letters

and parcels making it to their recipients on time,

so what was needed was some kind of engineering solution

to allow the trains to navigate around these difficult corners.

If the engineers were to keep their trains on track

and deliveries regular,

they would need to go back to the drawing board

and redesign them from the wheels up.

This stuff's sort of just been down here pretty much untouched

since 2003.

To see the solution engineers devised,

Andrew has been given special access

to where the post office railway's fleet

has been stored for decades.

This is the new design, and so the first thing we can do

is get out the tape measure again,

measure this distance here between the wheels.

It's about 1 meter 30, 1 meter 40, so much shorter.

And the other big innovation is that

this is connecting to what's called a bogie,

and it's made up of this big wheel here,

which is the drive wheel,

which is directly connected to the electric motor,

which is underneath this section here,

and then we've got this smaller wheel here at the back,

which is connected to carry the weight of that carriage.

And that means that this long carriage here

is able to be articulated

to rotate around this point, which is known as the kingpin.

And that meant that these trains are much more flexible

when it comes to going around tight bends.

Additionally, it meant you could have a much longer carriage

in between these bogies.

This new design came with a number

of significant advantages.

Firstly, there was less wear and tear on the wheels

and the track.

Secondly, there was less chance of derailments.

And thirdly, these lovely long carriages meant that we could

carry more posts beneath the streets of London.

Solving this final engineering puzzle

enabled the post office railway

to run successfully for 76 years,

reducing travel time across the capital

and, in the process,

alleviating congestion on London's busy streets.

This is pretty cool.

In the 20th century, this was a game-changer for the capital,

a hidden hero working tirelessly belowground

to keep London on track.

Hamburg, in northern Germany.

Despite being positioned 68 miles inland, incredibly,

this leading city of international trade

has grown and thrives from its busy port,

Europe's third-largest.

It's hardly any distance at all from the center

of the city of Hamburg, and yet there's this huge dock.

Connected to the north sea by the Elba river,

Hamburg links Europe with trade from east Asia

and the Baltic region.

But this port became so busy

that it's infrastructure began to struggle.

In order to keep up with the sheer volume of freight

coming in, engineers decided

to create a rail network like never before.

Hamburg is one of Europe's busiest ports,

and as the volume of cargo has exponentially increased,

the city's resources have been strained.

To deal with the escalating needs of the port,

engineers have created a remarkable rail-based solution.

The sheer scale of this place is just incredible.

It's taken us 5 or 10 minutes just to drive from one end

of this terminal to the other.

In 2002, they opened the Altenwerder terminal,

the largest container rail terminal in Europe.

Looking around this port, you can see the crucial

importance of rails, not just for the trains

that ultimately take a lot of the goods out of this place

but for all of the operations inside the port.

Everything is running on rails.

Everywhere around me, there are these giant cranes constantly.

Everything's bustling,

moving these containers off the ships, onto the land,

and then replacing them with new containers right over there,

keeping this whole port moving.

The real secret to this place's enormous efficiency

is these things.

And we've got a rail,

looking much more like a conventional railway,

but the thing that's weird about this is, we've just got one.

And if we were to imagine this as a train track,

it has a ridiculously wide Gauge,

'cause the other rail is somewhere over

the other side there.

This is an RMG, or a rail-mounted gantry,

and what this allows it to do is move this huge crane system

up and down along this massive stack of containers

and access any one of them.

Historically, both the port and city have grown in tandem,

with a road and rail network to distribute the cargo.

But in recent years,

a combination of ships getting larger

and a global increase in the use of containers

has led to a massive rise in the quantities of cargo

moving through the port.

For sales director Thomas Lutja,

keeping the freight moving is critically important.

Hamburg is one of the busiest industrial areas

we have in Europe.

1990, we had a number of about 2,000 containers

which were loaded and discharged.

Now we discharge up to 40,000 of those containers.

And by 2030, the volume of containers

that the port will handle is predicted

to increase by a further 43%.

But located in the heart of the city,

the port has limited space for expansion,

leaving no other option

but to find a way to handle the freight more efficiently.

A truck, it could carry two of those containers.

A train carries hundreds.

So we need to use the capacity which we have in German

and European hinterland best

because we will not get new train tracks, new motorways.

We have to use them better than before.

And the answer for that for us here in the north

is the railway.

When we started with this facility, CTA, 16 years ago,

this was the first fully automated terminal,

and I'll tell you, in the first years,

everybody was laughing about us.

Now it's standard.

This high-tech terminal has the capacity

to handle cargo from four ships simultaneously

and distribute it onwards into Europe,

either by train or truck.

Railways have long been integral to the distribution of freight

once it comes off of ships.

But what's surprising is that,

as soon as this ship hits the quayside,

it's immediately confronted by rails.

Container handling is divided into two stages.

The first is at the waterside.

It is the only part of the process

that requires a human crane operator.

Just look at the size of these cranes.

These things are called ship-to-shore cranes

for the obvious reason that they move their containers

off the ships and onto the shore.

And they are gigantic.

If that top beam gets tilted up to its maximum height,

it can reach over 100 meters in the air.

They called dual trolley because the top trolley

there brings the container off the ship down

to this level here, where a second trolley moves it

onto some automated vehicles over on the other side.

They are incredibly efficient,

move huge, huge numbers of containers.

But getting the cargo to shore is only

half the battle.

The next part of the process

is why the Altenwerder container terminal is known as

one of the most technologically advanced in the world.

The Altenwerder container terminal in Hamburg

is, in itself, a massive engineering accomplishment.

When a vessel first comes to port,

enormous ship-to-shore cranes move the containers to land.

Two remotely controlled cranes working at different heights

along a stack of containers,

taking them to and from automated vehicles.

Mounting these RMGs on rails is an incredible example

of engineering efficiency.

This whole thing is controlled by software.

The software says which containers

are gonna be pulled out,

which trucks are gonna be here to receive them,

and it makes sure that this enormous operation

can run smoothly and efficiently.

The port of Hamburg's bold use of technology

has transformed the way the port and the city operates,

with billions of objects connected to a computerized

system via intelligent sensors.

The degree of automation here is just astonishing.

You've got these thousands of transponders

sensing the location of every one of those vehicles.

Not a single human being.

And those things, there are some that are electric,

there are some that are diesel-powered,

and when they run out of batteries or run out of fuel,

they can automatically drive themself

to the filling station

or to a different station that swaps out their batteries

and gets straight back onto their work.

This groundbreaking solution to handling cargo

means that the port can now handle over 7 million

containers per year, setting new global standards.

In 2017, 58,500 freight trains passed through

Hamburg rail port,

transporting vital goods to its city and beyond.

This port is just such an impressive operation,

and the whole thing is running on rails.

To bring the goods onto this train track below me

and transport this cargo all around Europe

is just incredibly efficient,

all of it choreographed by software.

And without rails, that just wouldn't be possible.

Since the invention of trains,

the cities of the world have given engineers

some of their toughest challenges,

inspiring daring solutions...

Yeah, the cable cars is the backdrop

to everything San Francisco.

The grades that the cable cars overcome,

it's amazing to think that everybody can enjoy

and get around the city.

And groundbreaking innovations...

Nearly everything you buy, from food to clothes to cars

is shipped in these giant containers

on these enormous ships.

And without rails, none of this would be possible.

To create impossible railroads.

While not impacting the everyday operations

of the New York City passengers,

we have been building one of the largest civil projects

in the history of north America.

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