The sunny day brought out your scribe to work at Broadway, and a peep at the work on the bridge:

Scaffolders at work

Today was the day the scaffolding under the bridge went up. This is to allow shot blasting and metal repair to the beams underneath.

By mid afternoon, the scaffolding was in place, and sheets of plastic were being added, to cocoon the bridge to contain the dust and dirt that will arise from the repair works.

Plastic sheeting goes on.

Looking at this pictures, it suddenly dawned on me that there is something different about the top of the bridge - the parapets are missing ! They were there yesterday, and gone this morning. How efficient that is.

Here is a before and after view of the parapets:

Broadway before, and...

...Broadway after !

The latticework balustrades were in a dreadful shape, quite rusted through in some areas. Amazing how rust can eat through a piece of 1cm thick steel in the middle of nowhere in particular.

Notice how clear and clean the steelwork now is, ready for shotblasting of affected areas, and metal repair.

For pictures of such metal repair work, we must move over to bridge 5, at

LITTLE BUCKLAND

Patches cut out, balustrade cut off but still visible.

Repair effected at Little Buckland.

The contractor clearly is not wasting any time, and is getting on with the job. This looks like an excellent patch. If I am not mistaken, the deck plate is less thick than it looks, because a drip channel has been added to the front edge, to avoid any water running off the end, and then back, underneath the deck. This is what used to happen before and was the cause of some of the rusting, so this is an innovative improvement on the previous situation.

As an addendum to the Laverton bridge strike report, I need to point out that this is not a recent one. We did know about it, it's just frustrating that it keeps happening, even to new and well signposted bridges.