Gentlemen, your Tuesday bridge update is ready for inspection! It was a great, sunny warm day, and the contractors continue to be busy. Here is a little roundup of the work going on:

Bridge 2, Childswickham Road

After a return to base to manufacture to size the new pieces, there were 2 steelworkers on bridge 2 today, and they were completing the last of the larger (but not very large) repairs. The downside outer girder repair is now completed, as you can see in this picture.

Here we can see the underside of the same outer girder, where it has been reinforced to repair an old bridge strike.

These two pictures of two cross beam repairs show how the newly manufactured plate is provisionally attached to the beam on site, and then holes are drilled through in order to insert the bolts replacing the former rivets. The drill is an electro-magnetic one. Your scribe has never seen it used upside down though !

The same drill was used with a broach (hollow drill bit) to drill out the reluctant rivets from twisted plates on much struck Broadway bridge.

The steel workers hope to finish all of the steel this week. Three of the smaller deck plates have been welded in, but none of the larger ones. 

Bridge 4, Peasebrook farm

As you can see in this picture the deck has been completely cleared of concrete. What a strange construction, it does indeed look just like so much corrugated iron. Note the car in the corner - you can drive down there now, thanks to the completion of bridge 5. This time last year you could see Broadway goods shed in the distance from here, but since then the undergrowth has sprouted again. However, as you may have seen on the Lineside Clearance and PWay Flickr sites, work has started from Laverton to clear both lineside and trackbed. One helluva job - want to help them?

Underneath bridge 4, shotblasting has been completed and the voids between the corrugations filled in with brickwork. Looks tidy now. You can see here that the corrugated bed is not one big sheet, but a lot of channels riveted together. They don't make 'em like that any more.

Bridge 5, Little Buckland

This bridge is now virtually completed, as the two pictures below of the up and down sides show:

Looking west

Looking towards Buckland village.

Working on top of bridge 5 is the mini digger, spreading ballast over the protective sheet. This job was completed by the end of the day. It remains for the embankment to be raised to its final level. The one at the Broadway end will have to wait until work at bridge 4 is complete, as this point is used to access the trackbed to get to bridge 4.

 

Here you can see the mini digger spreading ballast around the Broadway end (leaving the above mentioned access possibility for bridge 4) and a bit more in the foreground, the brand new fencing. Nice job ! The new brickwork looks great too - remember that there is an enormous concrete infill right behind it.