Underground Railway System

Facts about the Vienna Underground Railway System


Opened: 1898; electrified 1925, modernised 1976 onw.

Length of route (2000): 38.13miles / 61.6km total
(of these 20.31miles / 32.5km are below surface)
Total length of track (2000): 116.4miles / 186.3km
Gauge: 1.435m
Voltage: 750V DC
Number of stations (2000): 76
Number of coaches (2000): 690
Passengers p/a (2000): 395.6 million
Train intervals: Regular traffic: all lines: 5mins
Peak hours:
U1: 2-4mins; U2: 5mins;
U3,U4: 3-4mins; U6: 2-3mins
Evenings: all lines: 7-8mins
Maximum speed: 50 mph / 80 kph
Deepest point: Schwedenplatz (U1), 142 metres above sea level
Greatest elevation from ground level: Spittelau (U6), +13.6 metres
Maximum depth below ground level: Karlsplatz (U1), -24.6 metres

Oil Refineries

A refinery is a factory. A refinery takes a raw material (crude oil) and transforms it into petrol and hundreds of other useful products. A typical large refinery costs billions of pounds to build and millions more to run and upgrade. It runs around the clock 365 days a year, employs hundreds of people and occupies as much land as several hundred football pitches.

A REFINERY breaks crude oil down into its various components, which then are selectively changed into new products. This process takes place inside a maze of pipes and vessels. The refinery is operated from a highly automated control room.

All refineries perform three basic steps:

• Separation (fractional distillation)
• Conversion (cracking and rearranging the molecules)
• Treatment

Ports

A port is a location on a coast or shore containing one or more harbors where ships can dock and transfer people or cargo to or from land. Port locations are selected to optimize access to land and navigable water, for commercial demand, and for shelter from wind and waves. Ports with deeper water are rarer, but can handle larger, more economical ships. Since ports throughout history handled every kind of traffic, support and storage facilities vary widely, may extend for miles, and dominate the local economy. Some ports have an important, perhaps exclusively military role.



Distribution
Ports often have cargo-handling equipment, such as cranes (operated by longshoremen) and forklifts for use in loading ships, which may be provided by private interests or public bodies. Often, canneries or other processing facilities will be located nearby. Some ports feature canals, which allow ships further movement inland. Access to intermodal transportation, such as trains and trucks, are critical to a port, so that passengers and cargo can also move further inland beyond the port area. Ports with international traffic have customs facilities. Harbour pilots and tugboats may maneuver large ships in tight quarters when near docks.

Different types of ports:
• fishing port
• warm water port
• seaport
• cruise home port
• port of call
• Cargo ports

fiber optics

Hallo, this is a condensed version of my presentation.
An optical fiber is made up of the core (carrying the light pulses), the cladding (reflecting the light pulses back into the core) and the buffer coating (protecting the core and cladding from moisture, damage, etc). Together, all of this creates a fiber optic which can carry up to 10 million messages at any time using light pulses. Fiber optics is the overlap of applied science and engineering concerned with the design and application of optical fibers. Optical fibers are widely used in fiber-optic communications, which permits transmission over longer distances and at higher bandwidths (data rates) than other forms of communications. Fibers are used instead of metal wires because signals travel along them with less loss and are also immune to electromagnetic interference. Fibers are also used for illumination, and are wrapped in bundles so they can be used to carry images, thus allowing viewing in tight spaces. Specially designed fibers are used for a variety of other applications, including sensors and fiber lasers.

OIL PIPELINES
Pipelines are a long-established, safe and efficient mode of transport for crude oil and petroleum products. They are used both for short-distance transport (e.g. within a refinery or depot, or between neighbouring installations) and over long distances. An extensive network of cross-country oil pipelines in Europe meets a large proportion of the need for transportation of petroleum products.

For almost 40 years CONCAWE has been collecting facts and statistics on incidents and spills related to European cross-country pipelines. Results are published yearly in a report including a full historical analysis. A map of Refineries & Oil Pipelines in Western Europe is also available.