About Us

About the HKTS

The Hong Kong Tunnelling Society (HKTS) was formed at an informal meeting at the Mariners Club in Kowloon, Hong Kong, in September 1997. The first formal meeting was held at the same venue on 28 October 1999, where Alan Morris (MTR Senior Construction Engineer at the time) gave a presentation titled “MTR Corporation's Quarry Bay Congestion Relief Works”. For the next 20 years, HKTS met generally on the last Friday of the month, usually in the 3rd-floor meeting room of the Mariners Club. The typical format of the evening included a presentation by one of a wide variety of engineers, contractors, consultants, clients, and suppliers, followed by drinks in the bar opposite the meeting room. Over the years, many shafts, adits, tunnels, and caverns were built, with countless cubic metres of rock and soil excavated, shotcrete sprayed, and rings built. Methods and techniques were discussed, argued, agreed upon, and even a little bit of knowledge may have been learned in the hundreds of hours spent in the China Coast Bar of the Mariners Club.

Sadly, in 2017, the Mariners Club was closed for demolition and redevelopment. The new facility is nearing completion, and it is hoped that HKTS can return to the Mariners Club sometime in 2025. Following the closure of our long-time venue, it became quite difficult to find a suitable location to continue the Society's meetings. This, coupled with the downturn in tunnelling works, civil unrest in Hong Kong, and the COVID pandemic, led to a hiatus of meetings between November 2017 and October 2023.

In mid-2023, a number of HKTS regulars met to see if and how the society could be restarted. We held the first of this new era of HKTS meetings in the 1st-floor bar of “Taboo” in Wanchai on 27 October 2023, and have continued to hold monthly meetings since then. HKTS was originally a very informal gathering of like-minded people, operating on a shoestring basis where a sponsor was found for the evening, usually the company making the presentation, who would sponsor some drinks after the meeting, or the HKTS would pick up the bill themselves from the small funds accumulated from the very modest door charge for each meeting.

At the October 2023 meeting, it was quickly decided to attempt to bring the HKTS into a more formal setting by becoming a registered society, with a formal constitution, membership, bank account, committee, website, etc. Fast-forward to December 2024, when the HKTS acquired full status as a learned society and held its first Annual General Meeting (AGM). A formal committee was elected, and since has diligently organized regular events including evening seminars, partnership events, site visits and much more for the tunnelling community of Hong Kong.  

David Salisbury

Secretary

The HKTS Committee

The HKTS Committee was formally elected at the innaugral AGM in December 2024. The current committee includes:

Some Notable HKTS Milestones

28 October 1999: First meeting

26 May 2000: Russel Black – Future Expansion of the Hong Kong MTR Network

28 October 2005: Colin Foster – Some Parting Shots: A highly amusing evening of views from a retiring engineer with a few home truths and sage advice thrown in.

24 April 2009: Alan Morris – MTR XRL (largest attendance of 169 people)

20-21 November 2009: IoM3 Tunnelling Conference – Joint organisers

29 January 2010: Russel Black’s Retirement Party (over 100 attendees)

11-12 September 2015: IoM3 Second Tunnelling Conference – Joint organisers