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hat wrote:The A650 Bingley Relief Road, whilst not requiring a move of the railway, involved re-aligning the leeds-liverpool canal & the re-construction/extension of a railway bridge into one bridge to span the railway, road & canal, whilst keeping the railway open. Interestingly the bridge was built before the cutting for the new road was made underneath it.
IIRC the work to the railway bridge was not an essential part of building the relief road but it made obvious sense to do it at the same time - especially as the railway was being electrified at the same time.
The railway bridge had its superstructure replaced but its abutments were unchanged. The old canal bridge was demolished and a new 2-span bridge was built to carry the minor road, with one span going over the relief road (on the original line of the canal) and the other over the realigned canal.
If the 3-rise locks had been a little further south they would have got in the way of the relief road.
Further south the railway goes over the relief road. IIRC this bridge was built by temporarily diverting the railway.
At this latter location the lighting columns on the road get shorter as you approach the railway bridge:
worcsfan wrote:Seconded. But so so tragic that the bodies could not be moved from the tunnel.
Thanks guys. I think the original intention was to remove the bodies from the tunnel and re-open it, but checks carried out after the collapse found the tunnel to be unstable and so the decision was taken instead to seal it off and realign the railway. The accident report mentioned that the collapse could have happened at any time, so you can only imagine the consequences of what might have happened if the tunnel had collapsed with a train passing through it.
hat wrote:The A650 Bingley Relief Road, whilst not requiring a move of the railway, involved re-aligning the leeds-liverpool canal....
Since we've moved on to canals diverted for roads, I give you the Worcester and Birmingham, where a new cut had to be made here when the M42 was built.
"If you expect nothing from somebody you are never disappointed." - Sylvia Plath
AIUI This bit of Canal was lost in Glasgow when the M8 was built. It was then reinstated in the last few years, I believe, which meant moving the A879!
Rob. My mission is to travel every road and visit every town, village and hamlet in the British Isles.
I don't like thinking about how badly I am doing.
rileyrob wrote:AIUI This bit of Canal was lost in Glasgow when the M8 was built. It was then reinstated in the last few years, I believe, which meant moving the A879!
When the Wester Hailes estate in Edinburgh was built in the seventies, a large section of the Union Canal was piped underground to make way for it. As part of a Millennium project to restore the waterway, this section of canal was brought back from the dead during 2000, which resulted in the realignment of Hailesland Road and the building of a new overbridge in nearby Murrayburn Road.
The Grand Union Canal here acquired a new loop when the Birmingham MRR was being improved and this section dualled.
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rileyrob wrote:AIUI This bit of Canal was lost in Glasgow when the M8 was built. It was then reinstated in the last few years, I believe, which meant moving the A879!
For those of you who have seen me write previously about working on the Glasgow motorway plans in the 1970s, this was quite a part of what we worked on. The old Monkland Canal was put into a pipe from east of the M73 near Coatbridge, through into Glasgow, and the M8 follows its course from west of the M73. The piping of this (to maintain the westbound water flow) was done before I got there, probably around 1970, but we (three of us, one on the staff, one on the level, one on the book) surveyed the whole length from the M73 into the city, in the depths of winter. If the M8 has an undulating profile there now, you can probably blame my cold fingers. There were various access chambers to the pipe which had been put in along the way, which got in the way of our plans, and indeed some poorly-finished civils; I felt very grand in the first weeks of a first job specifying for left-over sheet piling still protruding from the ground to all be cut back.
[url=http://maps.google.co.uk/?ie=UTF8&ll=51 ... h&z=14Here[/url] is an example of a railway being diverted for a port. In this case, a loop is added to the railway to enable a station in the passenger terminal of Harwich port, and make freight movement by rail easier.
Nwallace wrote:As for Porthmaddog, which railway are we talking about?
WHR, FR or NR?
The FR is being given a new bridge over the road, but the NR Cambrian line is getting moved over a bit for a distance near Minffordd quarry as it gets a bit tight near there.
You can easily see why it needed to be moved. As much as I think the waterfront at FW can be massively improved, it's much better than it was then and the station is in a much more sensible place!
