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Cut (earthmoving)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

In civil engineering, a cut or cutting is where soil or rock material from a hill or mountain is cut out to
make way for a canal, road or railway line.

In cut and fill construction it keeps the route straight and/or flat, where the comparative cost or
practicality of alternate solutions (such as diversion) is prohibitive. Contrary to the general meaning of
cutting, a cutting in construction is mechanically excavated or blasted out with explosives. Some cuts
are make on one side of a slope or a cliff, others directly through the middle or top of a hill. Generally,
a cut is open at the top (otherwise it is a tunnel). A cut is (in a sense) the opposite of an embankment.

Cuts are typically used to reduce the length and (often more importantly) the grade of a route.
Road cutting
[1]
Cuts can be created by multiple passes of a shovel, grader, scraper or excavator, or by blasting. One
unusual means of creating a cut is to remove the roof of a tunnel through daylighting. Material removed from cuts is ideally balanced by
material needed for fills along the same route, but this is not always the case when cut material is unsuitable for use as fill.

The word is also used in the same sense in mining, as in an open cut mine.

Contents
1 History
2 Types of cut
3 Notable cuts
3.1 Notable canal cuts
3.2 Notable railway cuts
3.3 Notable roadway cuts
4 See also
5 References

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History
The term cutting appears in the 19th century literature to designate rock cuts developed to moderate
grades of railway lines.[2] Railway Age's Comprehensive Railroad Dictionary defines a cut as "a
passage cut for the roadway through an obstacle of rock or dirt."[3]

Types of cut
There are at least two types of cut, sidehill cut and through cut. The former permits passage of a
transportation route alongside of or around a hill, where the slope is transverse to the roadway. A
sidehill cut can be formed by means of sidecasting, i.e., cutting on the high side balanced by moving
the material to build up the low side to achieve a flat surface for the route. In contrast, through cuts,
where the adjacent grade is higher on both sides of the route, require removal of material from the area
since it cannot be dumped alongside the route.[4]
Talerddig cutting through the
Notable cuts Cambrian Mountains, Wales in 2001.
Created as part of the Newtown and
Notable canal cuts Machynlleth Railway, with a depth of
120 feet (37 m), it was the deepest
Culebra Cut (Gaillard Cut) on the Panama Canal cutting in the world at the time of its
Dawesville Cut opening in the early 1860s. The
original near-vertical sides have since
Notable railway cuts been trimmed back

Olive Mount cutting, Liverpool

Bergen Hill
Duffy's Cut
Talerddig cutting
Windmill Hill Cutting
Hellfire Pass

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Notable roadway cuts

Sideling Hill Cut on I-68

Pikeville Cut-Through on U.S. Route 23 in Kentucky

See also
Cut-and-cover
Embankment (transportation) Open-cut station of the New York
Trench City Subway
Dashrath Manjhi
Flying arch, use of a dummy arch bridge to stabilise cutting walls against landslip

References
1. Herbert L. Nichols, Jr., and David A. Day, P.E., Moving the Earth: The Workbook of Excavation, 5th ed.
(New York: McGraw-Hill, 2005), pp. 8.16 et seq.
2. Alexander Smith (1875) A new history of Aberdeenshire
3. Robert G. Lewis et al., eds., Railway Age's Comprehensive Railroad Dictionary (Omaha, Neb.: Simmons-
Boardman Books, 1984), p. 48. This reference does not include a definition for the corresponding term fill.
4. Nichols and Day, Moving the Earth, p. 8.16.
Wikimedia Commons has
media related to Cuttings
(transport infrastructure).

Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Cut_(earthmoving)&oldid=780873659"

Excavation of Olive Mount cutting,
Categories: Cuts (earthmoving) Construction Geotechnical engineering Rail infrastructure Liverpool. Watercolour by T.T.Bury
Road cuttings Construction terminology (1833) The cutting was 20 ft (6.1 m)
wide and 70 ft (21.3 m) deep.
Construction required the removal of
This page was last edited on 17 May 2017, at 18:14. 480,000 cubic yards of sandstone.

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