Great Britain: Sainsbury Bridges (1)

Continuing on our walk along the River Avon to Bath, we arrived at Sainsbury's Bridges. I wish they wouldn't put two different bridges next to each other because it's hard to distinguish each bridge's features. For instance, in this photo, it looks like the bridge in front has a plastic roof, when it's actually on the other bridge.

The structure in front was a railroad bridge that was converted for highway use after the trains stopped running. I would have called it some kind of lattice truss, except they usually have a roof. Maybe the roof was removed when the bridge was converted to vehicular traffic. The bridge is a two-span steel through truss structure supported at midspan on a large stone pier with cutwaters and on seat-type abutments. Note the big rocker bearings supporting the truss.

Since these bridges provide access to the Green Park Railway Station, I wonder if the pier was the former location of the Midland Road Bridge? The strange thing is that we don't see any sign of where a pier might have been attached to the Midland Road Bridge (in yesterday's photo). Also, it's apparent that the Midland Road Bridge doesn't need a support at midspan. However, there is quite a bit of room on the existing pier where another bridge may have stood.

The other Sainsbury's Bridge is a footbridge supported on three precast I girders. We'll take another look at both these bridges tomorrow.

Great Britain: Sainsbury's Bridges (1) by Mark Yashinsky is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.