Hi Chaps
Our son lives near Endinburgh close to the Forth Bridges, we were visiting over the weekend and as the weather was good on Monday we decided it would be nice to walk across the road bridge.
These are a few shots we took off the road bridge of the old rail bridge.
As you can see from the scaffolding they are still painting it, apparently this time they are shot blasting it down to bare metal and painting it with some modern paint that will last 50 years, I wonder how many tones of the old red lead paint they will have to remove.
This is a ground level shot of the road bridge.
My sons father in law is a civil engineer who worked on the bridge when it was being built, he's actual walked over on the cables, he was telling us that they have a problem with corrosion in the cables they've got microphones attached and they can hear the wires breaking apparently its a world wide design fault with this type of bridge, and if they don't stop it at the current rate they will run out of wires in about 15 years time.
There was a couple of crews working on the bridge when we went over, one crew were working on one of the cables sitting across it roped on goodness how high off the ground they were, no way would you get me doing that. I got chatting to the other crew, they'd got a compressor hooked up to a hydraulic intensifyer, and they were tightening up the bolts that hold the tower cross brasing a job they have to do every 6 months, and because of fatigue the bolts are replaced every 5 years. The bridge moves due to wind and traffic, you can actually feel it move when a big truck passes over.
Have fun
Stew
