Bart Bear's Blog

The Oldies get really excited about great engineering. On their big trip last year they managed to see lots of the classic structures in the UK, where modern engineering started. This is the world's first major steel bridge, the Forth Rail Bridge near Edinburgh in Scotland. The Oldies had dinner at a great little pub/resseturaunt (I still can't spell restaurant) that is between this bridge and the road bridge, also a spectacular one. Mum was really hyped up and spent most of dinner time counting trains. Forth Bridge was built in the 1880s to carry two tracks of the British North Railway across the Firth of Forth. The bridge is over 2.5 km long and has towers 140m high. The railway is 46m above the high tide level. A real engineering marvel. When the oldies were there the bridge was having some major maintenance done. The big white structures on the towers are supports to make sure that things don't fall apart while the bolts and rivets on the towers are being inspected and replaced if necessary. Trains keep running across the bridge all the time, even when it is being worked on. I think it is a really pretty bridge, I like red.

Labels: engineering, Scotland