happy medium

Sydney Harbour Bridge just turned 75. The entire bridge was designed in England, 80% of the steel was even produced in Middlesbrough. Six million hand driven rivets and 53,000 tonnes of steel were used. They started at both sides of the harbour, meeting in the middle. Not bad considering it was designed without the aid of computers, on the other side of the world. It’s also very wide for such an old bridge – 8 traffic lanes and 2 rail lines (two of the traffic lanes used to be tram lines).

If your not great with heights, it’s actually not the arch of the bridge that’s bad, it’s the walkway under the bridge. The Arches are wide, with the walkway in the middle, so other than crossing over on the top, you can’t look over the edges straight down. Before you climb up the arch, you’re on a steel grated walkway hanging below the road, which is the only real vertigo inducing part of the climb. Once you get through that, you can relax and enjoy the easy climb to the top…

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 17th, 2007 at 5:20 am and is filed under happy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.