NON=STOP PAINTWORK
FAMOUS BRIDGE HOLDS ITS JUBILEE. • The Forth Bridge, which celebrates its 50th anniversary this year, is a. glutton for paint. Forty-five painters are regularly employed on the 135 acres of steel-work.
About three years are required to cover the whole fabric, and one complete coat absorbs 120,000 pounds of paint. Painting has been in progress since 1883. before the bridge was completed. and it is estimated that well over 900 tons of paint has been used so
The famous bridge, a monument, to British steel, was opened by King Edward VII when Prince of Wales, and provided a direct east coast all rail route between London and Scotland bv Spanning the Firth of Forth. The bridge cost £2.500.000 and materials put into it included upwards of 54,000 tons of steel. 6.500.000 rivets. 740,000 cubic feet of granite masonry 64.300 cubic yards of concrete and 46.300 cubic yards of rubble masonry. The foundations reach 91 feet below water level and its extreme height, is 361 feet above high water mark, or nearly as high as St Paul's Cathedral. Vast amounts of copper must have collected by'now on the bottom of the Firth of Forth beneath the bridge, because of the many people crossing by train who throw a halfpenny into the water “for luck."
German warplanes have dropped far more dangerous things into the Forth, but the bridge has not been damaged.
Permanent link to this item
Hononga pūmau ki tēnei tūemi
https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/newspapers/WAITA19400904.2.91
Bibliographic details
Ngā taipitopito pukapuka
Wairarapa Times-Age, 4 September 1940, Page 8
Word count
Tapeke kupu
233NON=STOP PAINTWORK Wairarapa Times-Age, 4 September 1940, Page 8
Using this item
Te whakamahi i tēnei tūemi
Stuff Ltd is the copyright owner for the Wairarapa Times-Age. You can reproduce in-copyright material from this newspaper for non-commercial use under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International licence (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0). This newspaper is not available for commercial use without the consent of Stuff Ltd. For advice on reproduction of out-of-copyright material from this newspaper, please refer to the Copyright guide.
Log in