Strathspey Railway

Mainline connections from both ends, it would make a good cross country railway!

Its worth, it, its just complicated. Like all good endevours.

 

Tonight at 7 30

Speyside featuring a Rickety Suspension bridge that I had a hand in installing at Aberlour in1981

Blink and you miss it including Julia's comment about it being a bit wobbly.

 

If you start off from Forres, head south over Dava Moor, then back up the Spey Valley to Keith, before returning back to Forres on the ScotRail service, it would be the basis of a good day out.
It might just be possible on a pushbike!

 

BBC News - Historic rail bridge collapses into River Spey
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c1m87jlv97ro

 

Crumbs. Someone hasn’t been looking at the structure closely enough. I wonder if there will now be a worry about other bridges on former railways?

 

It's a good job it's nothing to do with the Strathspey Railway, then!

 

I was a little concerned to see this article the other day too on a similar subject https://www.newcivilengineer.com/la...rm-on-lack-of-technical-expertise-12-12-2025/ I spent an enjoyable year inspecting bridges for a local authority a few years ago, it can be quite easy to get blase about long standing defects, an event like this does bring into sharp focus how important it is to know exactly what judgements you're making.

 

Stand by for crocodile tears from politicians who wouldn't pay to maintain it properly because they had higher priorities (to them, and their voters) to do with the money.

Noel

 

The collapsed bridge location is about 30 miles down the River Spey from the present-day Strathspey heritage line, near Garmouth on the former GNSR coast route beteen Portsoy and Elgin.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipe...p_of_Great_North_of_Scotland_Railway_1920.jpg

Some readers may recall the 1989(?) collapse of the Ness Viaduct, which for some time isolated the railway network north of Inverness.

 

Incredible article; thanks for posting it! Too bad there's no way to make it 'required reading' for all local governments, etc.

In addition to getting blasé about them, they have to be recognized to start with! This line from that article was very noteworthy (emphasis added) - "Despite principal and post-tensioned inspections carried out in 2021, the severity of bearing degradation went unrecognised until a newly hired experienced engineer flagged the issue"! Morally, blowing off dealing with an issue may be worse (it's a deliberate decision to do something dangerous), but at a higher level, they are equally bad - the 'bottom line' is that either may result in a structural failure.

Noel

 

I’m afraid the issue will be money. We know local authorities have been starved of money for decades. They can’t afford experience for things like this and still pay for all the things they must by law do (community care and social work for example). It suggests a very broken system to me when revenue from car parks is one of the most important sources for many a council.

 

Which suggests that the priorities set by law are misguided...

I'm not a bridge specialist, but my semi-amateur impression is that there's no way to fix that one - e.g. by jacking the spans up, and then replacing first the pier, then the damaged members. (I wonder if the pier was the initial step in the failure - perhaps by being undermined in the riverbed? Or did something in the superstructure fail, which then, in the process of coming down, laterally loaded the pier at the top, which of course it was not designed to withstand? It will be interesting to read the failure report, when it comes out.).

Maybe it is possible to fix, though - but it might be cheaper to build a whole new one - especially if the replacement is only sturdy enough to support humans. But maintaining it would have been much cheaper than either. 'A stich in time', as they say.

Noel

 

I think what’s misguided is the constant laying on of more responsibility to local authorities without either increasing the central grant or allowing them new funding streams. The latest silliness is that the levy on £2m+ homes won’t go to the local authority but is taken by central government.

But enough thread drift.

I hope the money can be found to put in a footbridge on the collapsed part and make safe the rest. Or perhaps to replace the whole thing with a footbridge im similar style.

 

The inspection and reporting is only part of the problem. About a decade ago I was working on a highway scheme and trying to decide what to do with a couple of existing 1960s period box culverts - we wanted to widen the carriageways above them. Having got hold of the last inspection reports and noted the recommendations, I contacted the maintaining agent (it was a trunk road scheme, so maintenance funded from central government) and asked whether any of the recommended works were still outstanding. The response was along the lines of "I doubt that any of the recommendations have been implemented"!!!

Discussions a few months later with a consulting engineer I'd worked with many years previously confirmed that it was not, by any means, standard practice to actually address the recommendations of inspections.

 

You'd rather the law prioritise old infrastructure over helping the poor, children and the elderly.....?

 

Yes, at least to the extent of thorough inspection, if failure of that old infrastructure could result in deaths or major economic loss. If serious defects are found it's then a separate question whether to spent money putting them right or to close the structure.

 

The failure of existing infrastructure, not just in the UK but globally, and many of the other problems afflicting us and the World, have the same root cause, the current iteration of the capitalist economic system. And no, I haven't any idea of how to fix this!

 

Modern Monetary Theory

 

Interesting video uploaded to YouTube: Damaged iconic railway bridge between Garmoth and Spey Bay

 

Interesting. It looks like the main flow has shifted from underneath the main span, off to a side channel and that increase in water flow has presumably resulted in much higher erosion around the support on that side.