At least some of them are still manned. I’m pretty sure the road lift bridges are (Columbus Rd., Center St., W. 3rd, etc.), I’ve seen those guys. The train bridges may be remote control, I don’t recall ever seeing an operator on those.
I know that Cleveland holds some sort of record or another, but it might be for the most different designs of moveable-span bridges.
Or at least, manned some of the time. I’ve been over the Columbus Rd. bridge several times, and never saw anyone manning it. Might be a function of the times of day that we cross that bridge.
Yep, i think we hold the world record for the most variety of movable bridges. We have swing bridges, vertical lift bridges, bascule bridges, jackknife bridges, and rolling lift bridges. All within a 6-mile stretch of what many consider the world’s most difficult channel.
Tower Bridge has a nice website. You need to give them 24 hours notice, but most of the ships big enough to require a lift are just scheduled traffic: they are already showing scheduled lifts out to 3 months ahead.
I see that their booking method is email, and the control room is manned 30 minutes before the lift, and 15 minutes after the last lift. And if you have a medium sized mast, they only lift enough for clearance, not all the way up.
It’s fun to watch in Chicago.
In the spring and autumn there are a few days scheduled to let boats on Lake Michigan move from/to their winter beds. So, flotillas of sailboats will move on the river and wait as each bridge opens for them. Neat to see them all going though at the same time (and see the bridges open).
If you want weird stuff happening around water, the Falkirk Wheel is right up there. It’s not a drawbridge, but it’s certainly impressive:
The beauty of that is that, regardless if there’s a boat in neither, one, or both segments, and regardless of the size of the boats (as long as they fit in), it’ll always be perfectly balanced.
Do the pointy bits counterclockwise (or anticlockwise, I suppose) of the cylinders have any purpose, or are they just decorative?
The Falkirk Wheel is pretty huge, so those pointy bits are not a trivial amount of additional material. So I expect they have a function. But I haven’t looked into the details of it, so I can’t say what it is.
It looks to me like the bottom two pointy bits have a rod running across between them when the whole thing has stopped. Maybe to lock the whole thing in position while boats are going in and out?
This Falkirk Wheel - Wikipedia suggests but does not quite say outright that the pointy bits are entirely decorative, a nod to the Celtic two-headed axe.
Clearly the entire canal on a bridge, the wheel itself, the pond at the lower level, the visitor center, etc., were designed with a strong eye to public architecture as public art. This is not a purely utilitarian structure like some anonymous railroad bridge over some random river out in the boonies.
Thinking about it, it’s likely they are both functional and decorative. That is, they needed something in that location, but had a certain amount of latitude about its shape. So they made it a decorative axe-shape.
That would be a candidate for the “stupidest product design” thread. I have to assume there’s some other way to get the phone number to contact them other than a sign on the bridge, itself. It would suck to climb into your boat, cruise up to the bridge, and only then place a call to the bridge operator and sit around for 12 hours. There better be some source for this info that you can look up in advance, and make your request before you set sail
IIRC, navigation charts for the Delta have a legend with contact numbers for draw bridges that are covered by the chart. You only have to forget to request an opening once and you’ll remember forevermore. We had a little runabout and never had to have a bridge opened for us, but my dad worked with a guy who sailed, and he had to plot their outings. Kind of tough to do sometimes when you’re at the whim of the winds.
In boating and sailing, if you are going to be stupid, short-sighted or unprepared, you’d better be tough, patient and prepared to live with the consequences.
One of my neighbors recently caught the Woodrow Wilson Bridge opening. It’s really quite the feat of engineering. It carries more vehicular traffic than any other drawbridge worldwide.
Despite the huge amounts of traffic, it opens more often than you’d think; a little more than once per week. The old bridge was lower, and opened 260 times per year. Requests are made by telephone, at least 12 hours in advance.
For those who don’t know, as I didn’t, the Woodrow Wilson Bridge - Wikipedia is in Washington DC.
Other than gross size, the design of that bridge is very similar to the 17th St. Causeway Bridge - CDR Maguire Engineering here in Fort Lauderdale. Call it the Baby Bear version of the Woodrow Wilson. Fort Lauderdale 17th Street Causeway Bridge - Google Image Search
And like the WW bridge, when this new much taller bridge was built the number of daily openings were greatly reduced. The cite/site says it opens on the :00 & :30, but that’s only as-needed. There are large sailboats and megayachts that park on the far / inland side of the bridge and don’t fit under its 55 foot air draft. But not many and they don’t go through very often. Maybe 1 or 2x / day. The old low bridge had to open pretty much every single half-hour during twilight or daylight.
They’re both very pretty structures.
Now I wonder about how it worked back when Cleveland was an industrial powerhouse. Most of the bridges over the Cuyahoga are too low to let a freighter pass, and so have to be opened for them. Even today, I’m getting estimates ranging from “several per week” to “several per day” of how many freighters go through (I’m not sure how there’s so much uncertainty), and it was surely much higher back in the day. The city does have a few tall bridges, but only a few (five for cars, plus a couple of rail bridges). It’s no wonder the East Side - West Side divide is so sharp.
I suspect the “several per day” is when they run shuttles from the Ore dock on Whiskey Island to the steel mills (usually American Courage). I think that’s mainly demand-driven rather than scheduled.
There may also be a lot of nightime ops.
E.g. Several ships load during the day, then once 10pm rolls around they open a few bridges to let the flotilla proceed into the lake. Then again around e.g. 2am there’s a reverse flow of ships coming in to unload and reload that upcoming day.
There’s a lot of waiting around in the ship biz. Bridge timing is just one more source of waiting.
When I first moved to the Chicago area, and was working downtown, in the late '80s and early '90s, it was before they switched to doing the “boat runs” on scheduled days; at that time, if a boater (usually a sailboat) wanted to make a run up or down the river, the city had to accommodate them. As I understood it at the time, it was because the laws on the books still gave water traffic right-of-way over all land traffic.
It seemed to often happen during lunchtime; I was working at an office which was right on the river (next to the Wells Street Bridge), and there was a group of us who would go out for lunch together, going south on Wells into the Loop. We’d regularly discover that there was a series of bridge lifts going on – often for just one or two boats – when we were coming back to the office, and we’d wind up stuck on the wrong side of an open bridge for a few minutes.
At some point, I think in the mid-to-late '90s, the laws changed, and those “midday on a work day” bridge lifts became rare.