Jim Hitchen sent me a report on the Broadway Footbridge reclamation work, currently being a carried out at Wishaw:-
A glorious sunny day in Wishaw on what turned out to be a
somewhat frustrating day as far as progress was concerned. In view of the
heavy committment earlier this week at both Cheltenham and Avonmouth, it was
hardly surprising that we could only put out a small but very select team of
four volunteers, Roger J, Peter Q, Ian H, and myself. This was further
reduced at lunchtime when yours truly returned to Broadway to attend a
meeting..
Bill
Ian wrestling with some guttering |
The main success of the day was a meeting with a local shot
blasting company to discuss the way forward with the various footbridge
components. Unfortunately the main span and the two staircase sections
are too big for this firm's workshop and as they don't shot blast on site, we
will have to look into other similar companies. Subject to an acceptable
quotation the two tower sections and the two staircase mid platform supports
will be treated as one job and we are hoping to have these prepared for
treating by the end of this month. However we hadn't realised that all
the loose rust has to be chipped off by hand before shot blasting, so we will
have our work cut out to achieve this.
Peter doing the same on the other tower |
On our previous visit we had been pleasantly surprised by
how easily most of the low level bolts were coming off. Well today was
different. It took all four of us about an hour to prise off four high
level bolts and that was with the aid of a seven foot scaffold pole.
Three men undoing one of the high level bolts, it actually took four but I just had to stop and get the camera out. |
We did manage to complete two quite important tasks.
The most important one being to cover both staircase sections with tarpaulins
so as to stop the rainwater collecting on the steps which are now in a
horizontal rather than a vertical one. The second was to complete the stripping
of the walkway timber from the spare footpath span. Unfortunately the
promised storage container was still not available though we should be able to
move all our materials in to it on our next visit.
Finally I now have a firm date to meet with a consultant
whom I hope will be able to undertake the design work necessary to produce the
design details for the foundations and the modifications necessary so that the
footbridge will meet our requirements when it is finally installed at Broadway.
Regards
Jim H.
Thanks to all who went to Wishaw today. It's a daunting task in anyone's book, but such a rich reward to see it all back in place at Broadway.
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