Damn shame, that
This is one of the idiosyncracies that makes Britain Great. Why get rid of it for a generic paintjob? What next, sort the schools out? Mumble, mumble, I don't know, grr grr
Forth Bridge painters to down brushes in 2012
Painting on the Forth Rail Bridge is scheduled to end in 2012, concluding over 100 years of relentless brushwork which inspired the phrase "like painting the Forth Bridge", the BBC reports. Network Rail is set to end the century of endless slog by stumping £74m for a three-coat paint job similar to that used on oil rigs and …
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Monday 18th February 2008 17:17 GMT Mark Matheson
A story of half-truths
Unfortunately, it looks like Balfour Beattie are using the urban legend to advertise theirselves.
It's totally untrue that the Forth bridge was painted continually. That would be a logistical nightmare.
The frequency of the trains and the amount of safety equipment required to do such a job makes it a very slow process. But if they did do that, you would never see the bridge without tonnes and tonnes of scaffold hanging off of it.
True, there may have been frequent patchwork over the years, but its first big paint job since the day it went up was in the early 90's.
I know, I was there. I worked for the company that did that job.
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Monday 18th February 2008 17:17 GMT Anonymous Coward
2.4 million hours...
...over 6 years? I'm pretty sure there's only 52,560 hours in six years. If your working day averages 8 hours, and you don't work on Sundays, then there's only around 15,000 working hours in six years. That means 2.4 million working hours is nearly 960 working years. So by my calculations they were at it for 842 years before the bridge was even completed! I _suppose_ they could have meant "man hours". In that case they had an average of just over 159 and four fifths of a person working on it at any one time...
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Monday 18th February 2008 18:25 GMT Tawakalna
three coats?
...I hope that the first is a proper undercoat this time, and that they prime the surface properly before they start. I'd have done it for £300, 20 Bensons and a cuppa char. I quoted for that Channel Tunnel too back in the 80s but got turned down, even though I gave them a discount on 2x 26mile RSJs.
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Monday 18th February 2008 18:25 GMT Bob
@ Flatspot
The 2.4million hours quoted in the post would have already cost somewhere in the region of £43m for labour alone and that was just for a period of 6 years. Another 34 on top of that plus inflation....well you do the math.
I happen to know that a skilled tradesman (which im guessing they would be to work over a bridge...could you see a chav in his burberry hat hanging off the forth? you might want to but that's not the point) are charged at around £18 per hour...about 1/3 of which they actually get paid (if they're lucky).
So financially it does make sense, perhaps the saving can help pay for Northern Rock...you know until it folds and we have to bail it out with our taxes.
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Monday 18th February 2008 18:25 GMT Trevor
hang on a minute
If they have been painting for 100 years but the paint only lasts 40 years then the paint at one end of the bridge should have had the next repaint started 60 years ago surely?
If the bridge is 100 miles long and it took you a year to do a mile you'd only get 40 miles in before you had to start painting the first mile again.
So you get a second team in who start at the beginning and the first team does the next 40 miles.
The first team is now at 80 miles and the second team is at 40 so you need a third team to start the first mile again.
Now it gets tricky see because the first team can do the last 20 miles and the first 20 miles and the second team is at 80 and the third is at 40
I'll just get my coat and go now....
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Monday 18th February 2008 18:25 GMT Tony
@Painters vs IT Costs
Actually it's not quite as simple as "a few guys, couple tins of paint and a brush". You have to remember, the bridge is over water, it's a long way up and the wind blows right up yer kilt! It's a real swine if you climb all the way out and then realise you to need to take a p***
As someone who has travelled over the road bridge a few times, I can assure you that anyone who is crazy enough to climb up and paint those things earns their pay.
There is a huge surface area (I estimate 6.0 sq Kilometre for 1 coat and at 30sq m per tin around 200,000 tins, but I could be miles out). I doubt that there is any single component small enough to be painted with a single tin of paint.
You can't just apply with a brush - the wind would blast it off before the paint had dried. Apart from that, it rains occasionally!
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Monday 18th February 2008 18:26 GMT Anonymous Coward
Contractors....
Well, if it's anything like the usual with these civil engineering contractors, it'll be done in 2020, cost 10x the original quote and three bolts will be missing at the end of it - resulting total collapse whilst a passenger train is crossing... Of course it'll all be the fault of the little cheese sandwich eating foreman whose name no-one will be able to remember.
Paris 'cos she's wondering what happend to the first, second and third bridges!
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Monday 18th February 2008 23:16 GMT Ian Ferguson
Re: Amazing
Furthermore, Seán, there are continuously updated webcams pointed at a variety of interesting struts and joins, so the three-layer paint process can be inspected online by the public as the sunlight-accelerated solidification process gets underway. I hear it's fascinating.
Train-spotting has nothing on this.
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Monday 18th February 2008 23:16 GMT William Clark
There was a programme about it
Sorry to be boring, but there was a programme about it a while back and this time the process of repainting is much more than just painting over the top. Sections of the bridge are carefully sealed against the elements, old paint is shot blasted to bare metal and the metal is primed asap with a decent (etching?) primer with corrosion protection - I was told once by a shotblaster (person) that bare steel starts to oxidise quickly once being exposed to air and getting the primer on asap is important.
The primer is cheked with some sort of handheld scanning device to ensure it has coated/stuck/taken properly to the metal else it gets blasted off and they start again that area again.
Hopefully this will last or they can build a new one in stainless (if there is that much chromium around...)
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Monday 18th February 2008 23:16 GMT Alan Gregson
Title
It takes so long because you get to the top of ladder, splash a bit of paint about then your can's empty, so you have climb back down to the bottom, pop round to B & Q, but they clean out of that shade, so you have to start again with a different colour.
I tell you, it's like painting the forth bridge this is...
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Monday 18th February 2008 23:16 GMT Anonymous Coward
Actually...
@Mark Matheson
"...
It's totally untrue that the Forth bridge was painted continually. That would be a logistical nightmare.
The frequency of the trains and the amount of safety equipment required to do such a job makes it a very slow process. But if they did do that, you would never see the bridge without tonnes and tonnes of scaffold hanging off of it.
..."
Have you seen the Fourth bridge over the last few years? It is totally (well, not quite) covered in scaf. It's not like the 'good old days' when you didn't have the H&S.
I have family in St Queensferry, when visiting, you could often see workers going in and out of the little hut thing in, if memory serves the 1st cantalevered bit. I am pretty sure that they were stripping and painting it constantly up until the early 90s when the trains were privatised - I seem to remember a Blue Peter all about its painting probably Peter Duncan.
It seems like a good idea to have it painted once in every long time, but I can't help thinking that Balfour Beaty wouldn't be the company that I got to do the work... *metronet* *cough*
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Monday 18th February 2008 23:16 GMT Chris C
2.4 million hours? Really?
Being from the US, I'm ignorant of this bridge, so please forgive me. But I still think I can reasonably question the accuracy of those numbers. 2.4 million hours over six years? A typical full-time job is considered eight hours per day, five days per week. Giving two weeks vacation, that's 2,000 hours per year per person.
2,400,000 man-hours / 6 years = 400,000 man-hours per year
400,000 man-hours per year / 2,000 hours per year per person = 200 people
Are they actually saying that for the past six years, they've had 200 people working on this full-time (40 hours per week)? Call me ignorant or call me crazy, but I can't imagine that for a bridge of any size. And if they really did have 200 people working on it full-time, I would hope it would have been finished within those six years (which it obviously wasn't).
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Monday 18th February 2008 23:16 GMT Anonymous Coward
@sean
Not "the internet", "The Register"!
Where else, in the same place, can you find such a small group of people with such a broad range of ersatz expertise ranging from the environment, through IT, over astro physics, under civil engineering, around automotive engineering, up on through fine arts, between the legs of sociology, round the corner past international politics, straight on by economics and with a fly by Gary Glitter?
Well yes, around every tea-urn in Britain at 11am, and huddled together by the main bar just before closing time, and in little thoughtful clusters in the stadium at half-time , but apart from there, where??
Ok, up by the allotment on a warm sunday afternoon, and every frosty morning down by the Piccadilly line among the train counting anoraks, and just about everywhere on the internet that allows anonymity without a character-limit and inside Jeremy Clarkson's skull... but apart from there, where? Nowhere, thats where!
Of course, except for...
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Tuesday 19th February 2008 06:19 GMT Anonymous Coward
@Fraser
"It's the bloody Fourth Bridge. There is no structure named the Fourth Rail Bridge. Why would they have called it the Fourth Rail bridge when that was the only bridge over it at this point at that time?"
Um - not being from there...
BUT BEING ABLE TO READ....
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forth_Rail_Bridge
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forth_Road_Bridge
I would say that there are both a 'rail' and a 'road' bridge...
PH because I think that even she speaks English...
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Tuesday 19th February 2008 08:50 GMT Dave Edmondston
@George Schultz
It's more usually called 'The Forth Bridge' locally.
Remember from 1890 till the mid-sixties it was the only bridge at this point - if you wanted to get your car across, you used the ferry...!
The only time here (Edinburgh and Fife) it's referred to as 'The Forth Rail Bridge' is on traffic reports, when they have to differentiate between the two.
Here's one of my pics of the bridge, showing how long even the support viaducts are...
http://nikongear.com/smf/index.php?action=dlattach;topic=8143.0;attach=2875;image
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Tuesday 19th February 2008 08:54 GMT dervheid
Putting it into perspective...
for our American cousins. When a new gas loading terminal was being built on the Forth near to the bridge back in the early eighties, one yank "engineer" was apparently giving the standard "We built this, we built that, bigger, better yadda, yadda, yadda" speech to some of the locals. One large Fifer, puts his arm around the yank and pointing at the Forth Bridge says "See that, well WE built that while you were still fighting the f**king indians!" Bragging session OVER!
The big difference in the paint job this time, unlike the last 'high-tech' paint job, is that they're taking the structure (cast iron) back to bare metal, not just slapping it over 100 years worth of 'red lead' paint. When they did that, back in the 90's (correct me if I'm wrong Mark M!), they sealed in all the moisture and the bridge started rotting under the paint, with some fairly large bits falling off!!
As for the 'lifespan' of this latest paint job, I'll just wait and see.
One question though, is the 20 years being measured from when the first sections were completed, or the last, as there'll be about a 10 year period between the two?
Mine is the "Craig & Rose" red one!
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Tuesday 19th February 2008 10:11 GMT Anonymous Coward
@Forth...
Yep, Forth, not fourth, my goof, late night internet not condusive to bothering to ignore the Firefox spellchecker when it's obviously wrong.
@George Schultz - The victorian one with the rail lines over it is known as the Forth Bridge, as it was the only bridge there until the 60s (if memory serves) the other one with the road over it is known as the Road bridge. No matter what wikipedia, that bastion of truth, says, it is the Forth Bridge.
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Tuesday 19th February 2008 11:06 GMT Anonymous Coward
The Return Of The Black Lamp
I feel every day we slip into an era of mindless squabbles over cash. When the Luddites where in the factories and smashed those darn machines, making weaving the first job to take away manual labor. Then years later motor companies really ditch massive numbers of workers in favor of robots to carry out the work. Now many workers who spend decades of whats become a national tradition now put out by wonder paint. I agree mechanical weaving has made better clothes, and robots do build better cars, which are safer etc. But its the same old same old one day your employer pats you on the back and says good job and then feels notes in his pocket, tomorrow that same employer pats you on the back and says "good job but i have to let you go". How soon will it be before we live in a totally automated world. Visions of 1984 that film of The Final BIG BROTHER spring to mind. EEEeeeekk
PS take Big Brothers (the CH4 show) and Princess Nikki, now you see how manual labor is an extra hassle for some folk...
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Wednesday 20th February 2008 12:49 GMT TeeCee
@Dave Edmondston re: bridge differentiation.
Sorry, I still don't get it. You mean that there are people up there dumb enough to listen to traffic reports and assume that the radio's talking about a four mile tailback due to a lorry fire on the rail bridge? Or that the 4:15 express has been delayed by the wrong sort of leaves on the road bridge?
And you allow some of these people to drive cars?
(Note to self, never drive in Scotland, it's way too sodding dangerous.)
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Thursday 21st February 2008 10:05 GMT Slaine
rail vs road
the river Forth (not Fourth) has it's estuary north of Edinburgh and leads inland providing the southern aquatic boundary to the Kingdom of Fife (the northern boundary being provided by the equally wet river Tay - referred to within trivial Pursuit as being "England's Longest Salmon River" for some strange reason).
In the same way as the "first world war" was never called the "first" but initially "the great war" whilst the second world war was always named the "second", the "first bridge" over the river Forth was called "The Forth Bridge". It happened to be a rail bridge, built deliberately over specification unlike the first Tay Bridge which had this nasty urge to drop itself and a train into the river one very windy night.
The second bridge over the river Forth could not also be called the "Forth Bridge, that would be confusing, nor indeed could it be called the "Third" or "Fifth" as the estuary is named "Forth", not the bridge named "fourth". Since it happened to be a Road Bridge - the name stuck.
Interestingly, it is the Road Bridge that is scheduled to fall down long before the paint on the Forth Bridge stops working. But since we will likely all be on the other side of the 3rd world war by then and throwing sticks at one another the need for either crossing is a mute point.
Note to self... get back to Fife ASAP!
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