Bridge bashing

[Grizz]

2 minutes ago, kevinlms said:

It didn't go unnoticed.

 

https://www.theage.com.au/national/victoria/ballarat-company-gold-bus-defends-decision-to-cover-up-logo-at-south-melbourne-bridge-crash-scene-20160223-gn0uxe.html

 Classic, love the Twitter.....totally sums up the situation. Tampering with a crime scene?.... don’t like it Coach Company well don’t drive you coach into a bridge. Suck it up!

 

 

[caradoc]

It looks as though, as in so many cases, the 'cover-up' will do more harm (to the company reputation) than the incident. 

 

[F-UnitMad]

2 hours ago, Grizz said:

We regularly have 44 ton wagons using our tiny country back roads in subtropical Sussex and they do this in the certain knowledge that due to no one ever being present to catch them and enforcing weight restrictions on bridges and other restrictions, they will always get away with it.

I used to regularly  use tiny  country back roads around leafy Surrey with a 44ton truck.

Why? Because that's where the Garden Centres I was delivering to were!!!! One was down a lane with a 7.5t weight restriction on it - with the caveat under it 'Except for Access'. Imagine Mr Plod's delight one day sitting in a layby on that lane & I roll past. Blue lights & everything!! Showing him the delivery notes showed I was within the law being there, but I can imagine the glow of self-righteous "serve the moron right" indignation from the car drivers who passed by, un-informed of the reality.

Oh and Garden Centres had deliveries by truck because trying to deliver a load of heavy pallets of compost by van is uneconomic, and also none of them had a private railway siding. In fact a lot of them didn't even have a local railway station.

[JDW]

Reminds me of one of our regular nuisance passengers complaining at me that I'd gone down a road (which all buses were being diverted down due to roadworks) that I wasn't supposed to go down and that I'd gone past a weight limit sign. I just nodded and agreed how disgraceful it was, I couldn't be bothered explaining the difference between a red circle with black lettering on a plain white background saying "7.5t" and a red circle with a black silouhette of a lorry on a white background and white lettering in the lorry silouhette saying "7.5t". He'd still have argued that I was wrong.

[JZ]

1 hour ago, kevinlms said:

It didn't go unnoticed.

 

https://www.theage.com.au/national/victoria/ballarat-company-gold-bus-defends-decision-to-cover-up-logo-at-south-melbourne-bridge-crash-scene-20160223-gn0uxe.html

Ambulance crew. "We must get on to recue the injured" "No mate. You'll have to wait until we've taped over the bus company logo"

[eastglosmog]

4 hours ago, Grizz said:

..............................

 

We regularly have 44 ton wagons using our tiny country back roads in subtropical Sussex and they do this in the certain knowledge that due to no one ever being present to catch them and enforcing weight restrictions on bridges and other restrictions, they will always get away with it. The usual excuse in the extremely remotely chance that they are stopped is ‘oh my Satnav sent me this way’. 
 

................................

 

 

You should do what we do when 7.5t+ trucks go over our local river bridge (7.5tMGW) - take a photo and report to the District Council Trading Standards Office.  They take the mater seriously and will prosecute if adequate evidence is provided. (Collapse of the bridge would cause an awful lot of problems, cutting the railway station off from the town.)

[melmerby]

1 hour ago, caradoc said:

It looks as though, as in so many cases, the 'cover-up' will do more harm (to the company reputation) than the incident. 

 

Gate, horse and bolted comes to mind.

It will have been spalshed all over the local (&national?) media with the logo clearly visible, plus all the social media posts, I can't see what purpose it serves.

 

Many bus & coach operators e.g. Stagecoach have a distinctive paint schemes to mark them out from their competitors.

Covering the name wouldn't achieve much if anything to disguise the operator.

Edited October 25, 2020 by melmerby

[peanuts]

10 minutes ago, eastglosmog said:

You should do what we do when 7.5t+ trucks go over our local river bridge (7.5tMGW) - take a photo and report to the District Council Trading Standards Office.  They take the mater seriously and will prosecute if adequate evidence is provided. (Collapse of the bridge would cause an awful lot of problems, cutting the railway station off from the town.)

realy easy answer to this "if you dont want lorrys on the road stop buying stuff " 99% of goods delivered in this country have spent some of there journey on a lorry 

[eastglosmog]

5 minutes ago, peanuts said:

realy easy answer to this "if you dont want lorrys on the road stop buying stuff " 99% of goods delivered in this country have spent some of there journey on a lorry 

I think you underestimate the % of goods that require a lorry for some of their delivery journey!

[Wickham Green too]

16 minutes ago, melmerby said:

....... Many bus & coach operators e.g. Stagecoach have a distinctive paint schemes to mark them out from their competitors.

Covering the name wouldn't achieve much if anything to disguise the operator.

Yeah, the GOLD colour of the BUS is a bit of a giveaway !

[melmerby]

21 minutes ago, peanuts said:

realy easy answer to this "if you dont want lorrys on the road stop buying stuff " 99% of goods delivered in this country have spent some of there journey on a lorry 

When I was younger someone I knew was a truck driver.

He had a T shirt with the slogan

"If you bought it, a truck brought it."

[corneliuslundie]

Or as I have done, send an e-mail to the company concerned. It was a Machynlleth bus company which has a regular route to Newtown, but one of its coaches not the service bus so possibly the driver was not familiar with the area. The 7.5 ton signs are clear enough.

Jonathan

[melmerby]

31 minutes ago, corneliuslundie said:

Or as I have done, send an e-mail to the company concerned. It was a Machynlleth bus company which has a regular route to Newtown, but one of its coaches not the service bus so possibly the driver was not familiar with the area. The 7.5 ton signs are clear enough.

Jonathan

Do you know the coach was overweight?

 

EDIT

Also is it a MGW sign or a Goods Vehicle weight prohibition sign?

Edited October 25, 2020 by melmerby

[highpeakman]

19 hours ago, phil-b259 said:

 

And what happens when that gets knocked off its supports and squashes a car coming the other way?

 

There is a very good reason why bridge protection girders can only be fitted at the bridge itself - namely if clouted they are not going to be pushed over by the force of the impact.

 

The rules relating to the UK highway network make it clear that new build structures over the public highway (as opposed to car parks etc) less than 16'6" (the height below which every structure must have its height displayed on warning signs) are not acceptable because of the risk of them (i) becoming unsafe / dangerous to other road users when it and (ii) or, to mitigate that risk they would need to be massively intrusive structures.

 

 

A few miles from here there are (or were) bridge warning markers that are a few miles from the bridge they are warning of on an "A" road.  A gantry stands over the road with some hanging markers dangling from it. Presumably high enough (bridge clearance height) so no risk to windscreens but low enough to "clatter" on the bodywork of an over height vehicle. I have no idea how effective that would be or is in practice. I suspect that the type of driver who "doesn't see" a warning sign probably wouldn't hear such a warning anyway. I don't know what the dangling bits are made of - presumably they have to be fairly hefty to make a significant noise but not too hefty in case they cause damage (it might be that the vehicle will not need to go as far as the bridge in this case). They used to use similar things in front of level crossings where the road went under OLE wires on level crossings and probably still do? I don't hear as much about "strikes" on OLE but they must cause as much disruption as bridge strikes plus a few more sparks!

[melmerby]

2 minutes ago, highpeakman said:

I don't hear as much about "strikes" on OLE but they must cause as much disruption as bridge strikes plus a few more sparks!

OHLE is normally well above the "low bridge" height scenario.

The lowest with Mk3 kit is 4.7m but is higher (5.6m) over level crossings. A UK truck can typically be 4.9m high

https://isslabour.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/NR-L3-ELP-299887-Issue-5-Module-1-General-Requirements.pdf

 

I assume the warnings are for properly overheight vehicles.

[Michael Hodgson]

I thought those cow bells on strings were never very common and used on private rather than public level crossings?  I don't see that the permitted size in the road vehicle regulations would apply to trailers hauled by agricultural tractors over private crossings, so no reason why you couldn't stack the stuff as high as you like, until the railway starts stick up OHLE.

[corneliuslundie]

Yes, a general weight prohibition - it is a 200 year old bridge. And I checked the likely weight of the coach (a large one) before sending the message. Even empty well over the limit. There is a new bridge over the Severn not too far away.

Jonathan

[peanuts]

2 hours ago, highpeakman said:

A few miles from here there are (or were) bridge warning markers that are a few miles from the bridge they are warning of on an "A" road.  A gantry stands over the road with some hanging markers dangling from it. Presumably high enough (bridge clearance height) so no risk to windscreens but low enough to "clatter" on the bodywork of an over height vehicle. I have no idea how effective that would be or is in practice. I suspect that the type of driver who "doesn't see" a warning sign probably wouldn't hear such a warning anyway. I don't know what the dangling bits are made of - presumably they have to be fairly hefty to make a significant noise but not too hefty in case they cause damage (it might be that the vehicle will not need to go as far as the bridge in this case). They used to use similar things in front of level crossings where the road went under OLE wires on level crossings and probably still do? I don't hear as much about "strikes" on OLE but they must cause as much disruption as bridge strikes plus a few more sparks!

 a lot of the time its not that they dont see or it doesent register there is a very popular myth amongst HGV /psv drivers that bridges are 1 or 2 inches higher than what is posted and they will fit through ,see my earlier post where i was told this by a transport manager ! . there are also a lot of loudmouths in rdc waiting rooms and mess rooms who will happily tell anyone that will listen that they have gone under that bridge with a trailer marked as higher no probs crack on drive .sadly there are lots of gullible newbies about who will fall for it from the old lags with inevitable results especialy when being pushed to crack on and get the job done by there manager 

[johnofwessex]

One obvious point is that Road Haulage & Coaching contin large number of small operators/one man bands chasing the next job and often quoting unrealistic prices, so driving down what a more responsible operator might ned to charge, hence something of a race to the bottom.

 

The Bath tipper truck crash showed how some sections of the industry behave

 

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-38774080#:~:text=Bath tipper truck crash%3A Matthew Gordon and Peter Wood jailed,-27 January 2017&text=A haulage boss and a,five years three months%2C respectively.

 

The sentences handed out give some indication of what the judge thought of the defendants

[bigherb]

1 hour ago, peanuts said:

  there is a very popular myth amongst HGV /psv drivers that bridges are 1 or 2 inches higher than what is posted and they will fit through

There often can be, as bridges are marked in 3 inch increments slightly more if it is metric 0.1m.

 

[melmerby]

Does anyone think this will be struck?

https://goo.gl/maps/P9fqvsKP6r4U98WC7

 

It's above the height at which a sign is required.

 

Another unusual one where the height has been artificially reduced:

https://goo.gl/maps/An5NGEgJu2sVNHd37

Edited October 25, 2020 by melmerby

[eastglosmog]

9 hours ago, melmerby said:

Does anyone think this will be struck?

https://goo.gl/maps/P9fqvsKP6r4U98WC7

 

It's above the height at which a sign is required.

 

Another unusual one where the height has been artificially reduced:

https://goo.gl/maps/An5NGEgJu2sVNHd37

I would imagine the first one is to guide high vehicles into the center so they don't hit the haunches.

[Fat Controller]

15 hours ago, highpeakman said:

A few miles from here there are (or were) bridge warning markers that are a few miles from the bridge they are warning of on an "A" road.  A gantry stands over the road with some hanging markers dangling from it. Presumably high enough (bridge clearance height) so no risk to windscreens but low enough to "clatter" on the bodywork of an over height vehicle. I have no idea how effective that would be or is in practice. I suspect that the type of driver who "doesn't see" a warning sign probably wouldn't hear such a warning anyway. I don't know what the dangling bits are made of - presumably they have to be fairly hefty to make a significant noise but not too hefty in case they cause damage (it might be that the vehicle will not need to go as far as the bridge in this case). They used to use similar things in front of level crossings where the road went under OLE wires on level crossings and probably still do? I don't hear as much about "strikes" on OLE but they must cause as much disruption as bridge strikes plus a few more sparks!

There was one near Dagenham Dock, where a loaded car transporter caught the wires. I remember a whole train of Peugeots that sat at Frethun Yards for about a year; the 'jockeys' who loaded the cars had left the radio aerials up when loading, and they caught the 25kV. Apparently, the resultant fire took out several kilometres of wiring, before the train stopped.

[PhilJ W]

24 minutes ago, Fat Controller said:

There was one near Dagenham Dock, where a loaded car transporter caught the wires. I remember a whole train of Peugeots that sat at Frethun Yards for about a year; the 'jockeys' who loaded the cars had left the radio aerials up when loading, and they caught the 25kV. Apparently, the resultant fire took out several kilometres of wiring, before the train stopped.

Those same trains were subject to a lot of theft and vandalism back in the 80's. The favourite was stealing radios from the cars. One of the thieves came in contact with the overhead and the remains of the radio were found welded to his chest.

[sir douglas]

The Doncaster road bridge which i have mentioned previously that has been bashed many times for years, is now getting replaced this winter

https://www.wakefieldexpress.co.uk/news/opinion/major-wakefield-road-close-railway-bridge-reconstruction-work-begins-2995566

 

It will likely be done the same way we have seen elsewhere, the new bridge is prepared in the next to it and over 1 night or weekend, the old one is removed and the new put in. the main thing though is the traffic, there isnt another wide enough main road to adequately divert the traffic around, its all smaller roads that wouldnt take kindly to big artic lorries, they might get diverted through the M62 and M1

https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@53.6651647,-1.4431395,439m/data=!3m1!1e3