About
What Queensferry is
Queensferry is a place for civil and structural engineers to learn, work towards professional qualification, discuss engineering with each other, and help improve engineering tools. It has two parts: the Chartership Forum and the Lab.
It came out of ordinary practice, and out of three problems that keep recurring. Good explanations of engineering are scattered, and often behind a paywall. The route to professional qualification is difficult to work out on your own, and much of the advice in circulation is out of date. And the small tools that would save real time never get built, because no single project justifies building them.
The Chartership Forum is where the courses, the professional-development guidance, the discussion and the seminars are. The Lab is where engineering tools are used, tested and improved, with their limits written down next to them.
Courses are written to be worked through rather than skimmed, and every number quoted in one is recomputed by its tests, so the prose and the arithmetic cannot drift apart. Guidance on professional qualification is taken from the institutions’ own published documents and cited on the page where it appears. Nothing unfinished is described as finished.
Registration is free. It exists so that discussions can be moderated and testing feedback can be tied to a person and a version — not as a step towards selling anything.
What is here now
- Courses
- 8
- Disciplines
- Structural, geotechnical
- Qualification
- ICE, IStructE
- Lab tools
- 1
- Independent of
- ICE and IStructE
Counts come from the same registry the site is built from, so they cannot be out of date.
How it is written
Rules the site is held to
Status is stated, not implied
A course that is unfinished says so on its own card. A Lab tool lists what has been checked and what has not. Planned work is named but never offered.
Nothing is invented to fill a page
There are no example discussions, no member counts that are not real, and no activity feed that fills itself when nothing has happened.
Requirements are cited and dated
Professional-qualification guidance points at the institution's own document. Anything that changes between sessions — deadlines, fees — is not quoted here at all.
Independent, and clear about it
Queensferry is not affiliated with ICE, IStructE or the Engineering Council, and awards no qualifications. Nothing here is official guidance.
Where to start
Depending on what you need
You want to understand something properly
Start with Learning. Courses are organised by discipline and say what they assume you already know.
You are working towards qualification
Start with Professional Development. ICE and IStructE are covered separately, because they ask for different things.
You have a question
Ask it in the community. Communities are grouped by subject, so it lands where people who know the answer will see it.
You want to test something
Go to the Lab. Testing needs an account so feedback can be tied to a version and followed up.
If something here is wrong, unclear or missing, saying so is genuinely useful. Get in touch, or post it in the feedback community.