After a brief pause - we have a life too, remember - we can give a further update of work on our bridges to Broadway:

BRIDGE 1 - Broadway

There are just 3 things left to do for completion: fitting the capping stone to the new upside Cheltenham end pilaster, fitting new sloping ballast retaining boards on top of the upstanding steel ones and then just laying the ballast. The ballast boards have been a tricky item to source but should be here by the weekend. 

The photograph showing the deck waiting for these items, with the missing pilaster cap stone centre left.

In the meantime the bricklayers have been busy pointing up the south face of the elevated wing wall extension at the Cheltenham end of the site:

 

Before the pointing started. In the foreground, the site of the former wooden signal box. The wall sheltered the box.

Contractors stripping out the old pointing.

 

The finished job.

BRIDGE 2 - Childswickham Road

The revised plan here is to do a full scale shotblast of the entire steelwork to this bridge, rather than just a localised blast of obviously corroded areas. (as was done on the others) This means that the shotblasting work is still continuing and some very heavy scale is being removed. Hopefully the work will be completed at the end of the week, and then the steelwork repairs can start next week. We learned that so far the shotblaster has used 54 tonnes of copper slag blast medium in total on all of the bridges done so far. Sounds an awful lot to us! And this bridge is heavily corroded indeed.

 

BRIDGE 4 - Peasebrook Farm

Just a reminder that we have encountered the effects of some very severe corrosion at this bridge which have eaten holes right through the ½” thick steel troughs (see previous post). In addition the concrete filling of the troughs has been done with very poor concrete (made with broken bricks) and is 75 mm too thin. The net effects of this are that the bridge is weak in both a bending mode, and also for transferring the vertical shear loads into the abutments. Got that?

 

With the shape of the troughing and the points of worst failure occurring at the most highly stressed points, the design of a repair scheme has been extremely difficult and after a 6-stage development programme we now have a scheme (see scanned drawing below), which is being costed as we write.

Design for the repair and strengthening of bridge 4

 

BRIDGE 5 - Little Buckland

This is now fully open, but the parapet steelwork has yet to arrive. 

The only work left is the fitting of the two capping stones to the new pilasters, the installation of the timber ballast retaining boards, the fitting of fencing up the wing walls and the laying of the ballast.

30 days to the end of the share issue...