General / Off-Topic Building bridges
- Thread starter starman
- Start date
I feel conflicted about things like this. I'd like to see it and drive over it - I love going over the Mersey Bridge, Dartford and the Severn Crossing. This would be a monumentally cool thing to see or drive over. I can imagine it on a dark, stormy night with lights flickering in the spray, driving over it and "landing" your car in Ireland! Oh, please include a walk-way. It would be so cool in summer to make a day of walking across it! - build a cafe at half way?
However. I suspect it would be pretty expensive (ie billions) to build and, really, how much travel would there be between N.I and Scotland? You'd be driving from a fairly remote part of Scotland and arriving in a fairly remote part of N.I. and it's 30 miles apart, meaning it'll take a fair while and on windier days probably have to be closed. Anything that you want in either side you're probably going to be better off finding or building there because it's actually still quite a long way. You could commute over it, but if you are going to a major town it's likely to be a 40-50 miles journey.
I also don't know that mariners are going to take having a sodding great bridge across this expanse of sea - it would need supports and that's a hazard to navigation if ever there was one. Even the span might be for larger vessels, depending on how high the bridge is. And the higher it gets the more expensive it gets and the worse the wind problems are.
So I think it's a really cool project, but equally I'm not sure that the expense of it would be justified by the small number of people who'd actually use it over a Ferry.
There are parallels with HS2....
However. I suspect it would be pretty expensive (ie billions) to build and, really, how much travel would there be between N.I and Scotland? You'd be driving from a fairly remote part of Scotland and arriving in a fairly remote part of N.I. and it's 30 miles apart, meaning it'll take a fair while and on windier days probably have to be closed. Anything that you want in either side you're probably going to be better off finding or building there because it's actually still quite a long way. You could commute over it, but if you are going to a major town it's likely to be a 40-50 miles journey.
I also don't know that mariners are going to take having a sodding great bridge across this expanse of sea - it would need supports and that's a hazard to navigation if ever there was one. Even the span might be for larger vessels, depending on how high the bridge is. And the higher it gets the more expensive it gets and the worse the wind problems are.
So I think it's a really cool project, but equally I'm not sure that the expense of it would be justified by the small number of people who'd actually use it over a Ferry.
There are parallels with HS2....
I guess thats where the politics kicks in . It s physically connects 2 remote bits of the Uk.
Would be good if it had trees and benches 
Yep, it's all about the message of announcing the bridge not actually building a real one.
This is a fair point. At its deepest the Irish sea is a little under 300m deep. Which means you need -what-? 400m tall supports to get it 100m above the waves - assuming the bottom is able to support it. And it needs to be, or you're going to have a lot of tetchy sea captains.
There is a reason the channel tunnel is a tunnel, not a bridge and this link would be of similar length, although it's more northerly position would seem to make weather nastier. So there's that.
There is also the small matter of over a million tons of various munitions dumped into the Irish sea since the 1920s, a lot of which went into the general vicinity of the Beaufort Dyke, which is right in the way of any of the possible routes from the Ards pennisula to the Stranraer area.
