Maintenance update

Following a year of fairly hectic bridge repairing activities last year, largely dominated by the BRIDGES TO BROADWAY contract, this year has mostly been about getting our bridge inspection programme up to date.

The GWSR has a programme of annual visual inspections carried out by our own volunteer members, with the aim of inspecting and producing reports for all 46 Bridges that we own. In addition, we inspect as many as possible of the 60 culverts or so that pass under the railway. However, every 6 years we undertake a principal inspection, which involves employing a professional chartered engineer with wide bridge experience. The use of a cherry picker is usually essential, since most of the problems occur on top of the abutments, and are completely invisible from ground level. This also means the full or partial closure of the road, as can be seen below. This too costs money, as well as causing some inconvenience to road users. 

Over the last 12 months we have carried out 30 of these inspections, catching up on a large backlog.

Bridge 15 - Didbrook 1, down side

Bridge 34 - Gotherington Skew - down side

Bridge 37 - farm accommodation bridge, Bishops Cleeve

Having got the inspection programme completed, we now have a little of the budget left to do some actual repair and construction work. The top priority, within the budget money left available, was to deal with some collapsed wing walls on Bridge 37 above. This is a farm accommodation bridge on the outskirts of Bishops Cleeve, with no direct road access.

In the picture you can see that a large chunk of wing wall on the up side, Cheltenham end, has fallen over.  What isn’t visible is that a second section, nearer the camera has also fallen flat on its face and is buried under vegetation. The danger is that the embankment could slide towards the camera, risking the start of another embankment slip.

Broadway end wall, bridge 37

The upside, Broadway end wall is going the same way but the damage is much less severe, as seen in the picture above.

The first thing to be done was to remove the damaged wall sections and their foundations, and this has already been done as can be seen in the photo above, taken by Andy Prothero.The view is from track level and shows the excavation for the new wall foundation on the up side, Cheltenham end.

24 hours later it looks like the photograph on the left. The concrete foundation was cast yesterday morning, to avoid the risk of the heavy rain forecast for the weekend filling the clay based hole and softening the bearing material. Note the clever use of the machine bucket to assist with levelling the concrete.

Here we can see the foundations in place for the up side Broadway end wing wall, ready for brick laying to commence.

Scaffolding, bricks, sand & cement and a water bowser are all arranged to arrive on site early next week. We then have a lot of loose brickwork to take down on all 4 wing walls, and need to prepare the old brickwork so that it is ready to be renovated. Construction of the new wall will get under way by about mid week. We will be hosting a couple of apprentice brickies, who will be on site to experience first hand the problems of building with hard, blue engineering bricks, which in our case need to be laid at a 1 in 6 lean back from the vertical! Rest assured, they will have top class people leading them. It's quite a challenge.

 

It is also a very remote site mid way between Bishops Cleeve and Manor Lane, Gotherington, so material movements are not straightforward.