Great Britain: Gasworks Siding Bridge

About 600 ft downstream from the Midland Road Bridge (shown in background) is the Gasworks Siding Bridge. It is a two span steel, through girder bridge across the River Avon. It's only interesting feature is the two-column bent with decorated capitals that supports the bridge at midspan.

This bridge once carried a railroad siding and still carries a 12 inch pipe into the gasworks. In the Google Earth photo below you can see the small tank farm (south of the river), the two Windsor Bridges, the Gasworks Siding Bridge, and the Midland Road Bridge.

Great Britain: Gasworks Siding Bridge by Mark Yashinsky is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.

Great Britain: Midland Road Bridge (1)

About 1000 ft downstream from the Victoria Bridge is the Midland Road Bridge. This single span through truss doesn't have any vertical members, just a series of X's. The cross-bracing and portal bracing are attached to the top flange of the top chord for a little extra vertical clearance.

The Midland Road Bridge has two vehicle lanes and sidewalks. It crosses the River Avon without any skew and it's about 175 ft long. I couldn't find any information about when this bridge was built or who designed it. I looked on the Internet, but all I discovered was that there was some confusion between this bridge and the nearby Midland Bridge Road Bridge, which is understandable.

Great Britain: Midland Road Bridge (1) by Mark Yashinsky is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.

Great Britain: Victoria Bridge (3)

A photo of my wife and son standing in front of Victoria Bridge. The designer, James Dredge never became an influential bridge engineer, despite his innovative bridge designs.

Victoria Bridge (in Dredge's hometown of Bath) was his first bridge. He was a shareholder in the company that built it and they charged a toll of half a penny to cross it. The bridge weathered a powerful storm while it was being built which gave people confidence in it. It cost 1760 Pounds (in 1836) to build, it was turned into a public bridge in 1929, it was converted to a footbridge in 1946, and it's still in use.

The drawing above (from D. McQuillan's paper, From brewer to bridge builder: reflections on the life and work of James Dredge) shows one advantage of Dredge's 'Taper Principle.' A regular suspension bridge (on top) would collapse if you cut the cable in two but the Dredge bridge (at bottom) would remain supported if the suspension chain was cut in half.

I wonder if a modern steel suspension bridge was ever built using Dredge's 'Taper Principle?'

Great Britain: Victoria Bridge (3) by Mark Yashinsky is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.