Honshu-Shikoku Bridges: Tatara Bridge (3)

A last look at the Tatara Bridge. The Honshu-Shikoku Bridge Authority kindly took me on a boat trip in 1998 to look at construction of their expressway. The Tatara Bridge was complete except for some final work on the deck. It was a rainy day and clouds had descended to the tops of the towers.

The main span of the Tatara Bridge is a 890 m steel box girder. The side spans are 270 m and 320 m long and are prestressed concrete box girders at their ends to balance the weight. More information on fabrication of the bridge is provided by Uesugi Hideo and information on the erection of the bridge is provided by Satou Yoshyuki.

Honshu-Shikoku Bridges: Tatara Bridge (3) by Mark Yashinsky is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.

Honshu-Shikoku Bridges: Tatara Bridge (2)

Private corporations own, maintain, and collect toll revenue on most of the expressways in Japan. The Hanshin Expressway Corporation owns a dozen expressways in the Kansai region including the Wangan Expressway along Osaka Bay. The Honshu-Shikoku Bridge Expressway Company owns three expressways that connect Honshu to Shikoku. This includes the westernmost Nishi-Seto Expressway (National Highway 317). The expressway is 46.6 km long and includes nine long-span bridges that connect seven islands. We looked at the Ohmishima Bridge on the Nishi-Seto-Expressway two days ago. Just north is the Tatara Bridge, which had the longest main span (890 m) of any cable-stayed bridge when it was built in 1999. We also studied this bridge before (on February 8, 2009).

It crosses over the Tatara Strait between Ikuchijima and Ohmishima Islands. It was originally planned to be a suspension bridge, but advances in cable-stayed technology eventually made this bridge a more economical and environmentally friendly alternative. It took nine years, from August 1990 to May 1999, for the Tatara Bridge to be built.

Honshu-Shikoku Bridges: Tatara Bridge (2) by Mark Yashinsky is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.

Osaka Bay Bridges: Shorenji-Gawa Bridge

We left Osaka Bay a few days ago but I want to return to look at an interesting bridge.

The Shorenji-Gawa Bridge (north of the Tempozan Bridge) in Osaka is a three span continuous steel girder bridge on the Wangan Expressway.

It's unusual for a steel girder bridge because it's really long, with a 235 m (772 ft) center span. Steel girder bridges with spans greater than 200 m (650 ft) are extremely rare because they are so deep that the dead load becomes a problem. This bridge required a lot of analysis and many tests to ensure that it could resist the wind and buckling.

The bridge superstructure was constructed in three sections, carried to the mouth of the Shorenji River, and lifted onto the piers with two floating cranes.

Osaka Bay Bridges: Shorenji-Gawa Bridge by Mark Yashinsky is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.