TRANSCRIPT

I guess my motivation was two fold; in the first instance, I saw that the proposed new bridge consisted of poor-quality timber that had been pressure-treated in order to make it durable. It's a bit of a hobby horse for me, I don't like specifying these sorts of chemical treatments, if possible, and the thought of putting, of removing all of the existing structure and then putting a new structure back in its place, which was going to use a fantastic amount of wood, and chemically treated timber, just seemed environmentally, really quite nonsensical.

So that was the first motivation was, if nothing else, to recommend a kind of treatment that was more sustainable than the one that had been proposed - which is pretty outdated. In fact the form of treatment that had been proposed is a form banned in Europe, and we're probably heading that way ourselves.

So, the second reason I was interested was I looked at some of the initial inspections and studies that had been done and it was really clear that they had all been done from a peculiar, or the particular, perspective of, was the bridge fit or not fit, could it be repaired to the standards of a working railway bridge or highway bridge. Nobody was really looking all that carefully at whether or not it could be repaired. Let me say that again in a different way. All of the previous studies had viewed the bridge from the perspective of, if there's something wrong with it, it should be replaced, therefore a partially decayed element should just be replaced, and as you can imagine, with all of these long and big timbers in the bridge, if you take that view, you end up with an enormous tally of material that has to be replaced. No one had been looking at in terms of repair, and particularly from the perspective of repairs that are common in the heritage world, but maybe less available to people who are working for railway companies and bridge companies, day by day.