Not motoring
A vital link
Gavin Stamp
Ireturn to that wonder of the world, that triumph of British engineering, that extraordinary, century-old 330-feet high network of some 50,000 tons of steel that still carries trains from Lothian to Fife: the Forth Bridge. This is because I recently had the pleasure of inspecting the thing at closer quarters than is generally permitted while making a short film for the BBC's television series, One Foot in the Past the theme, inevitably, being the scandal of it rusting away.
We looked at it from below, slowly cruis- ing past Inchgarvie Island in midstream on the Maid of the Forth, for only from here does one fully grasp the sheer scale of the 1,730-feet leaps across the water — not one but two spans each a little longer than Roe- bling's Brooklyn Bridge. And from below one can also see not only the condition of the steel — some parts badly rusted, others newly painted — but also missing inspec- tion covers, allowing water and seagulls to penetrate the great steel tubes and do their worst.
And we went on top, reaching the struc- ture from Dalmeny Station by walking along the approach viaduct and then climbing to the top of the Jubilee Tower, the southern masonry entrance arch that heralds the transfer on to the first cantilever. From here we looked down on to the twin tracks and up towards the first summit formed by the red-brown girders, a disconcerting vision of colossal achievement set against a panorama of water and distant hills with, to the left, the seemingly more fragile road bridge and, to the right, a prospect of the North Sea. Then down to the railway within the bridge girders — echoes of Robert Donat leaping off in The Thirty-Nine Steps — and down further through manholes between the tracks to reach some of the little `bothies', the workmen's huts that are suspended all over the structure.
All this, I may say, was by kind courtesy of Railtrack. My previous encounters in England with that organisation — paranoid and bureaucratic — had not been happy, but in Scotland it seems to be different. Of course, had the BBC been denied access to the bridge we would have said so on film and it would not have looked good. But the public relations lady, Eve Boyle, could not have been more helpful. But what really worked with me was that she did not offer us the usual slick platitudes but gave fair answers to difficult questions. Of course she was defending her employers, but what won me over was that she knows about rail- ways and believes in them. This was a model of how PR ought to be.
For, whatever one may think of the advent of Railtrack and the destructive dogma of railway privatisation, the organi- sation has a plausible defence. It is clear that, in April 1994, Railtrack inherited a long backlog of inadequate maintenance. And one reason for this was the imposition of more stringent Health & Safety regula- tions. The cradles and pulleys that the painters once used to maintain the bridge were banned overnight in the late 1970s. After that, Scotrail was uncertain how to tackle the problem; `power staging' was tried with some success, but in the end it was decided to grit-blast off layers and lay- ers of paint and apply a new and, hopefully, longer-lasting protection. But this requires scaffolding, and the process is very slow and expensive.
Following the recent, damning Health & Safety Executive Report on the condition of the steelwork, Railtrack has allotted £3.2 million for repairs over the coming year. This is a huge chunk of its structures bud- get when the railway across the Forth is far from being the busiest part of the Scotrail system, and there must be a fear that, once Railtrack is floated, this budget will dimin- ish rather than increase. This only goes to expose the absurdity of the way this Gov- ernment thinks about transport, for the Scottish Office was quite happy to consider building a second Forth Road Bridge while starving the railways of funds. The sane answer, of course, is to get traffic off the roads by re-opening railways in Fife for commuters, like the line to Alloa and the branch to St Andrews, whose closure was plain stupid. As for the removal of the direct line from Edinburgh to Perth in 1970, that was surely devious for it was replaced by a road. So Perth suffers — and so does the rail bridge.
Yes, the Forth Rail Bridge is expensive to paint, but, in this accountancy-obsessed society, how does one put a price on a vital strategic link across a huge obstacle creat- ed by nature? The bridge carries 200 trains a day: it could take many more, but this includes Inter-City expresses to Dundee and Aberdeen. A modern bridge could no doubt be built that would be cheaper to maintain, but that is a fiscal impossibility — after all, out of railophobic malice, the Scottish Office would not even permit the new road bridge across the distant Dornoch Firth to carry rails as well, so leaving the railway north of Inverness at a severe and unfair disadvantage.
Not that I would wish Fowler and Baker's structure to be replaced. But the argument that Historic Scotland should help out because the bridge is famous and historic and listed — Category `A' — and a tourist attraction is nonsense. Its fame is irrelevant: the thing should be maintained because it is there and necessary and does its job — well. We cannot afford to replace it; the crucial question is whether — under this govern- ment, or a New Labour one — a privatised Railtrack can really afford to own it.
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