Stamps And Letters: Forth Railway Bridge mailart

Forth Railway Bridge mailart

Forth Railway Bridge mailart from Scott Thomson, Positively Postal founder and webmaster.

When I was a lot younger and my parents, brother and I used to travel over the Tay road bridge I would wonder and sometimes worry whether it might fall down before we reached the other end - pleasingly it never did! I didn't have similar thoughts about the Forth Rail Bridge, partly I think because it is substantially more imposing and having been there for over 120 years it has certainly marked its structural presence over the stretch of The Firth of Forth, over which it carries the East Coast Main Line with up to 200 trains crossing it a day.

I was also fascinated by the task and labour involved in painting it which due to its immense size had to be started all over again more or less the minute it was finished. A bit like clearing a path in the snow only for more snow to fall and back to the beginning again or for your washing machine to get to the end of the wash cycle, decide all your clothes are still dirty and then wash them again and so on, a painting version of Groundhog Day if you like!

However there is now no need to order another new batch of paint brushes since this time they have actually (nearly) finished painting the bridge and it won't need to be repainted for another 25 years which takes us into 2036! Layers of paint which had been applied over the past 120 years were blasted off and a glass flake epoxy formula, similar to that used in the off-shore oil industry has been applied.

It is the ending of this apparently never-ending task that I have partly illustrated in my mail art piece by drawing a circle for a pot of paint and placing my own technical drawing of the bridge across it and using the central span to form what looks like a No Entry sign into the pot of paint. I've added a picture taken in 1887 at Imperial College before the bridge was built showing the weight of the central span of a bridge being transmitted to the banks through diamond shaped supports. The gold first class stamp circled refers to the very last rivet , driven home by the then Prince of Wales when the bridge was opened on 4 March 1890, and which was gold plated and suitably inscribed. Not much point in looking for it now under that new coat of paint but the whole job is not due to be finished until Christmas 2011 so they might not have got that far just yet. It is then nearly time to throw away the paint brush and dig out the gold rivet metal detector instead!