There’s been roadworks on Mansfield Road in Nottingham down in the city centre for a few weeks now – when I walked past on the way to the cinema recently, it appeared they were nearing a crucial phase.

A huge, flexible, plastic yellow pipe poked out of the ground:

It extended down the street for quite a while, way past the junction with the end of Woodborough Road:

Looking at the part where the pipe went into the ground, it appeared that the new yellow pipe was smaller than an existing, metal pipe already in the ground, and the plastic one was being inserted into the metal one. (I don’t know whether this metal pipe was the previous one that was being replaced or one that has been laid specially to allow this new process)

So the end of the small pipe was fed into the opening of the old metal pipe, and the plastic pipe extended tens of metres down the road.

As I walked along the extent of plastic pipe not yet in the ground, I came across the workmen and their kit. They had a small tank-like vehicle with caterpillar tracks and a circle on a stick. It was under the pipe and holding onto it. It looked really clear to me that what was going to happen was that the little tank think was just going to shove the new pipe right into the old pipe. I asked one of the workers if that was the case, and he confirmed.

And I thought the whole idea was pretty cool, and that I should share it with you, which is what I’m doing now. And yes, I do worry about the sorts of weird things I find cool, but fairly consistently, heavy engineering projects makes me think “wow.”