Woody also wrote the following (no stranger to overmatter is our Woody...)

I just want to add a postscript to this, nothing to do with photography though. It’s about the picture I used at the beginning of the railway arches over the Jubilee River.

For those of you who don’t yet know, the Jubilee is a flood relief channel for the Thames created to stop the people from Maidenhead, Bray and Windsor complaining about their houses continually getting flooded (Rolf Harris being one of them). It was officially opened in 2002, the Queens Golden Jubilee Year, hence the name.

My angling association has the fishing licence from those arches downstream for two kilometres to the M4 motorway bridge, but the bit you see pictured we don’t fish. We keep it as a nature reserve, no one is allowed on it, which has an obvious benefit for wildlife, but it is a pity as the public as they may never know the secret of how the arches were created. The reason being that the plaque explaining it is fixed to the bridge.

Running across the top of the arches is the main Paddington to Bristol line built by Brunnel. The trick was not to disrupt the rail service in any way whilst the arches were being constructed and so they were formed on the land on both sides of the embankment. It was dry land then, the river bed being dug out later.

Once the tunnels were ready, the entire embankment was frozen solid using liquid nitrogen pumped through tubes. The holes for the tunnel were then dug out to exact measurements and the tunnel formations slid into place and jacked up for a tight fit. During the entire process, trains thundered along above the work, their passengers oblivious to what was going on and not one train was delayed.

British ingenuity at its best and now you know too.