"Bridge & Wheels Appeal" NYMR

The latest issue of the NYMR house magazine "Moorsline" says that an appeal to raise £1 million was to be launched in mid-February. £650,000 is for the renewal of bridge 30, which if not replaced will effectively sever the line. The other £350,000 is for the overhaul of BR standard class 4 80135, wanted back in service to reduce the lines dependance on hired-in motive power.
There is nothing on the NYMR website about the launch of this appeal, does anyone know if there has been a high-profile "send-off" for the appeal, or is it due to take place shortly?

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The mid-February launch is planned to be an Appeal to the NYMR's Life Members, although Moors Line includes details for all members or any other readers. The main launch is hopefully going to be at the start of April and discussions are well advanced for this to be in partnership with a regional media organisation with a good track record on appeals.

The Appeal is vital to the NYMR - without Bridge 30, you have two bits of railway with the main sheds on the shorter bit! The NYMR has already had to borrow heavily to purchase locos and rolling stock (at a considerable discount) from a benefactor a few years ago and to fund previous Bridge work. We can't really borrow again and Bridge 30 really does need replacing!

Obviously, all contributions are gratefully received ahead of the "full" launch. For the full launch, we will probably have a PO Box number in place but in the meantime anyone wanting to contribute (please!) can send donations to Bridges and Wheels Appeal Office, 12 Park Street, Pickering, North Yorkshire, YO17 7AJ. Small regular amounts or one off donations are equally welcome and a separate bank account is to opened for donations just to 80135 if you prefer to do that.

 

Thanks Bean-counter. My modest cheque is written out ready to go.

I guess with a sum as big as this, it will need heavyweight support, like Regional funding bodies such as Yorkshire Foreward. Even so, if every NYMRHRT member sent in a modest amount it would soon add up.

Good luck with this one. Lets hope that the bridge steelwork costs a little less than it would have done a year ago, however I suspect with this bridge it is as much the cost of installation in a difficult location than the cost of the steelwork. ( Or is it likely to be a couple of those huge concrete beams that are often used nowadays for bridgework?)

Regards

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The present plan is for two I section steel beams with a concrete deck atop of them. These will replace the single I section beam that was installed in 1908 when the bridge was strengthened. The existing outer beams, which are an essential part of the character of the bridge, will be retained but will provide no structural function. It will be an interesting exercise to do this work. There is absolutely no chance of access by a road crane and the span and weight are beyond the capacitiy of the largest rail crane available on the network. All manpower and materials will have to come to site by rail.

 

So somehow the new concrete beams will have to be slid off the rail bogies and over the gap into place rather than being lifted in by a crane or cranes.

Sounds like very interesting engineering.

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The plan is to use the NYMR's two steam cranes to inch the new beams cross, one each side. One of the national network infrastructure companies has indicated they might be able to provide a large crane, but the problem is, as Steve says, the location. The Grosmont side in an embankment and hence of limited width, whilst on the Goathland side there is effective a ledge cut containing the trackbed - to the east, the land falls to the river, whilst the west is a quite high retaining wall. The formation is double track, but that is the limit of space to set up the cranes. As Steve says, the beams will be steel woth concrete trough sections forming the actual deck, with ballasted track across this. The side beams will, once not involved in the holding the bridge up, be lifted off, cleaned, repainted and replaced.

The problem with this bridge, and originally the next 4 south of it, was they were originally built with the cross beams riveted to the bottom of the side beams, so all the weight was on the rivets. All the bridges were subsequently reconstructed to some extent, this one by having a further beam placed under the track, supposedly by being dropped into a "slit" in the trackbed at one end of the bridge and jacked into place. The next two under bridges south were rebuilt (the one at Darnholm by building a brick bridge under the iron structure - the cross beams are still visible in one or two places) and the side beams reused on the two bridges in what is now Goathland loop (and immediately south of it) to produce two, single track bridges at each location with new cross beams attached to the top of the bottom plate of the side girders.

The "new" bridge in Goathland Station is itself now life expired and will need replacing in the next 5 years.

And I must not forget - many thanks for the donation 46118!

 

For concrete beams read steel beams as per my post.
The original bridge would have been built up in situ on top of a substantial timber scaffolding. When the bridge was strengthene in 1908(?) a compound I section steel beam some 8 foot tall by 3 foot wide by 90 foot long was built up alongside the existing bridge and then slid into place and then jacked up under the existing bridge. As far as we know, all this was done without interrupting traffic!
Exactly how it is to be done is still being considered. One possible solution is to deliver the new beams to site by rail and offload them to the side of the bridge with the NYMR's two 45T steam cranes, one at either end. There's room to do that. That's relatively easy. The hard bit is getting out the old steelwork because you then won't have a bridge to put wagons on, onto which you can drop the old steelwork. The Environment Agency, responsible for the river, won't let the Railway drop the old steelwork onto the ground as it could be a problem if the river is in flood and dropping a 90 foot long girder weighing an estimate 24 tons wouldn't be easy, in any case, as it is obviously longer than the gap between the abutments! There's also the matter of 19 crossbeams to remove, each weighing about 2 tons, because no crane jib will reach anywhere near the middle of the bridge. These are underslung so have to be supported at both ends whilst they are cut. This is where some skyhooks would come in handy! After that, putting in the new beams and decking is relatively easy once the abutments have been modified to accept them.
You can soon see why this job is going to cost as much as it is in both time and money and why those who think that crossing the gap on the GCR is just a matter of dropping a couple of reclaimed bridge girders into place are living in cloud cuckoo land.

 

Personally, I don't think that the large Kirow 1200 crane can do the job. In theory the jib will just reach the centre but it has to be virtually horizontal to do so and you can't safely lift a 90 ft beam without a decent spread on the slings so the jib would have to be raised a good bit, reducing its effective radius. Then there is the problem of what you do with it once it has been lifted. It can't be slewed without cutting down a fair number of trees and the load is too heavy for the crane to travel with it.
In my simplistic explanation, I left out a lot of minor works such as having to pile and reinforce the area adjacent to trackbed for the crane outriggers to give them stability when lifting, provision of mesing facilities, transport too and from site of all materials, scaffolding to bridge the gap during construction works and a host of other things.

 

Thankyou both, most interesting.

This really sounds like the most difficult bridge replacement undertaken on a Heritage railway, and from your descriptions I can see where the cost comes from.

Thanks for the info.

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PS: When you start, why not set up a live webcam? If not, at least photograph the whole process for us to see, and indeed for the other professionals to follow!

 

Its worth pointing out that this is perhaps the biggest challenge and threat posed to a heritage railway since the SVR flooding, coming at a time when money is very tight everywhere. I hope that the railway preservation movement will help out just as they did with the SVR.

 

For those that are not familiar with the NYMR, this photo includes the offending structure:

http://markt79.fotopic.net/p31101785.html

(the best I can find in a quick trawl of the net). The perspective makes it look shorter than it actually is; doesn't show just how far down the river is below either! Serves to show how remote the location is though.

As for 80135, work has started, information provided here:
http://nymrunofficialforum.atfreeforum. ... t2544.html

AFAIK, the highest mileage preserved loco.

 

Are there some other more detailed photos out their somewhere just in case a clever bridge building engineer who likes railways stumbles across the project ?

Also don't Carillion have a new really big rail crane that can lift something like 125 tonne at a decent radius ? I bet that doesn't work every day of the week. To get a proper crane in may be expensive but it could be a false economy to do it any other way.

 

There are a number of pictures of the bridge in the latest issue of Moors Line, but these are not available on line. Web accessible details are obviously something we need to have available for the full launch. The bridge itself is difficult enough to access for even photography purposes, specially to view the structure from underneath.

If I remember the detail of presentation given to the NYMR's governing Board by our Hon. Civil Engineer Nigel Trotter, the plan is to ease the new beams into place across the bridge (they will, of course, be longer than the gap), form them into their final configaration in a brace, then cut the cross beams, lift the existing centre girder out and place on the other side of the bridge, repair the abutments as necessary before lifting the new beam assembly into place. The new beams will form the whole load-bearing structure of the new bridge, with the side beams and decking being retained but not load bearing. The concrete top deck will be in sections and be assembled atop the steel beams (this eases getting the components to site - basically, all major items will need to come by rail).

The work programme is a total of 15 weeks at present. This means to be completed by Eatser 2010, work would need to start before this coming Christmas, although Nigel is exmaining having the railway available for the Santa specials. Nevertheless, Pickering Carriage works are cirrently recertifying the Pullmans for use on the Esk Valley branch in part so diner services can be run on Network Rail if the NYMR is not available south of Grosmont and for winter operations.

Nigel did comment that Network Rail would probably schedule such a replacement to take place over at most a week - the cost would then be £4 million plus!

 

It's already with some clever bridge building engineers! I think the crane you've mentioned is the same as the one I've discounted. IMHO, it just can't do the lift at the radius required. One of the problems is that the bridge is on the skew so you can't get right up to the abutments. You also need terra firma to put down the outriggers and that is in short supply . Here are a couple of pictures of the underside to give a bit better idea. To give some better idea of scale, as I said, that beam is 8 ft tall by 3 ft wide

 

Without knowing the full details, has anyone considered diverting the river to the east side of the line since the railway crosses the river again within a few hundred yards.

Alternatively when the Rochdale Canal was being reopened to canal traffic certain road overbridges which had been culverted were replaced with long semi circular sections to the required canal dimensions and then overfilled with concret to bring it back up to road level. Thus changing an original road overbridge into a canal tunnel of roughly 50/100 yards. Turning to the railways problem I would have thought that the rivers authority would not have demanded as great a headroom as presently available and a similar solution could be considered.

Whilst I accept that the railway is in a National Park with strict planning regulations, it's importance to the local economy will stand it in good stead with the local authorities for any changes it needs to make of this magnitude.

 

I'm open to correction but the EA (River Authority) are even against the erection of scaffolding under the bridge as it may obstruct the rive in flood. They certainly won't allow any permanent reduction in bridge clearance (the question has already been asked as part of an alternative solution to the bridge problem). As for diverting it, the bridge would still have to be replaced and I suspect the creation of a suitably stable embankment would cost as much, if not more. The NYMR went down this route with bridges 15 & 16, diverting the beck between them and filling in the old bridges. The beck kept trying to revert to its original course scouring away the embankment on both sides leading to landslips and all sorts of problems In the end, the two bridges had to be re-instated using concrete ducts.

 

If all goes according to plan, the Appeal Letter to Life Members will be "stuffed" into envelopes this afternoon by Pickering Station Group (thanks, lads and lasses) and be on its way to our near 2,000 Life Members in the next day or two.

The Bank Accounts should also have been opened now - separate accounts for the main Appeal and for anyone wanting to contribute to 80135's overhaul only. If anyone would like to set up a regular donation, please PM me for details.

Steven Hogg
NYMR Finance Director

 

Just a quick update - ther letter reached Life Members in the middle of last week and by early this week the donations and pledges received were already well into 5 figures. Thank you all very much and please keep up the generousity!

Preparations continue for the full public launch, which is expected to be (in print at least) on 28th March with local TV coverage around the same time.

Further contributions will continue to be very gratefully received - please PM me with a e-mail address for a donation form or details to set up a regualr donation.

Steven Hogg
NYMR Fiannce Director

 

Any chance of making them somewhat smaller? I can't see them at all well on my laptop (1280 x 800 resolution).

Thanks =P~

 

If all is going as planned, the public launch of the Bridges and Wheels Appeal will take place tomorrow, Saturday 28th March, in the Yorkshire Post magazine.

this will be followed up (again if all goes according to plan) with a "taster" piece in BBC Look North Leed's shortened programme tomorrow evening and a full report on Monday (other news stories permitting - could be later in the week if something big breaks in the region over the weekend).

Also due to be an interview on Radio York just after 8:00am tomorrow.

Latest figure for donations from the membership is over £40,000 before Gift Aid and bankings from Wednesday and not including regular Standing Orders established.

Steven Hogg
NYMR Finance Director