In civil engineering, a cut or cutting is where soil or rock from a relative rise is removed.
Cuts are typically used in road, Rail transport, and canal construction to reduce a route's length and grade. Cut and fill construction uses the spoils from cuts to fill in defiles to create straight routes at steady grades cost-effectively.
Cuts are used as alternatives to indirect routes, embankments, or viaducts. They also have the advantage of comparatively lower noise pollution than elevated or at-grade solutions.
In river management, both terms are used likewise, the short-cutting of one or more , to speed its flow. Greater and recent examples are often formally suffixed Navigation (more flow-controlled) or a new name of river, whether or not a navigation, such as the Jubilee River which is a navigation only in part and only for canoes and kayaks. Finally, in the context of lowlands, a proper noun Drain, fresh water Sewer, dyke or otherwise called cutoff (especially in the Mississippi River Delta) often equally acts as land drainage for a very low gradient, tidal estuary or for a flood-prone formerly extensive marshland.
History
The term
cutting appears in the 19th century literature to designate rock cuts developed to moderate grades of railway lines.
[Alexander Smith (1875) A new history of Aberdeenshire] Railway Age's Comprehensive Railroad Dictionary defines a cut as "a passage cut for the roadway through an obstacle of rock or dirt."
[Robert G. Lewis et al., eds., Railway Age's Comprehensive Railroad Dictionary (Omaha, Neb.: Simmons-Boardman Books, 1984), p. 48. That reference does not include a definition for the corresponding term "fill."]
Creation
Cuts can be created by multiple passes of a
shovel,
grader, scraper or
excavator, or by
Rock blasting.
[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.] 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, in particular Open-pit mining. The use of cuttings often provides byproducts as a form of mineral extraction, commonly sand, clay or gravel; the cost of building drains, reinforcing banks against landslide and a high water table are factors which commonly limit its use in certain areas.
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 or the railway. 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.
[Nichols and Day, Moving the Earth, p. 8.16.]
A ledge is a cut in the side of a cliff well above the bottom of a gorge.
Lock cut
A
lock cut is a section of a river or other inland waterway immediately upstream and downstream of a lock which has been modified to provide locations for boats to moor while waiting for the lock gates to open or to allow people to board or alight vessels.
Notable cuts
Canal
Rail
Asia
Americas
Australia
-
Big Hill Cutting, New South Wales
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Windmill Hill Cutting, Western Australia
Europe
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Archaeological site of Atapuerca, Spain
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Olive Mount cutting, Liverpool, England
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Talerddig cutting, Wales
Road
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New Jersey Route 495 through Union City, New Jersey
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Pikeville Cut-Through on U.S. Route 23 in Kentucky
-
Sideling Hill Cut on I-68
See also
