scotianostra:On March 4th 1890 The Forth Bridge officially opened.Officially The Forth Bridge, peopl
scotianostra:On March 4th 1890 The Forth Bridge officially opened.Officially The Forth Bridge, people didn’t start to call it the Forth Rail Bridge until the 1960’s when the The Forth Road bridge was constructed, the Forth Bridge was the longest cantilever bridge in the world and the first major crossing made entirely of steel.The bridge was designed by two English engineers, Sir John Fowler and Benjamin Baker, and took eight years to build at a cost of £3.2m. Take a wee minute to remember the Seventy one workers known to have been killed during construction.Spanning 1.5 miles, weighing 53,000 tonnes and containing 6.5m rivets, the bridge, now operated by Network Rail, still carries 200 trains per day over the Firth of Forth, linking Fife with the Lothians.As its fame grew beyond the world of engineering, the bridge entered the common lexicon when the job of painting it was used to represent a task that never ends. How many times have you heard the phrase “like painting the Forth Rail Bridge” to describe a never ending job when you were younger? In 2011 however it was revealed that the latest paint job, which took 10 years and cost £130m to complete, should last for at least 25 years.In 1964, the famous rail crossing was joined on the firth by the Forth Road Bridge. A third bridge, the Queensferry Crossing opened to traffic on 30 August 2017. -- source link