[Local Landmark] Batman Bridge

[Artanis I]

Batman Bridge

The Batman Bridge is the only bridge crossing the Tamar River, which is a 70km tidal saltwater estuary. It is named for John Batman who was a co-founder of Melbourne in the 1830s.

Completed in 1968, this steel-decked bridge was the first cable-stayed bridge in Australia. The full length is 442m and the main span of 206m is suspended from a 100m high A-frame tower on solid dolerite on the west bank. The east bank is only soft clay, so steel piers are built on piles driven up to 18m deep, holding the road up until it reaches the causeway. All this is necessary to allow the 29m clearance below for ships. Quite a feat of engineering!

To recreate this in Lego as an Architecture set requires a lot of poetic licence regarding relative scale (sadly), number of supports & cables. So this version is much shorter & wider than a true accurate model would be. And I wondered why no Architecture sets had been made of bridges... and it's no wonder how huge the expert Tower Bridge set is.

I hope you like this little rendition of a very interesting contruction, it was fun despite the repeated running-out-of-parts-in-the-necessary-colour problem (what can I do instead?) that I'm sure we all have at times.

More (and bigger) photos in the Flickr album.

Finally, a bonus photo from google of a view I've never seen before today - wow:

[Exetrius]

Nice entry, I especially like the way you angled and connected the two large suspension pillars.

[CaptainZebra]

Looks very clean. It would make an excellent display model.

[BrickJagger]

I don't see any black or very, very dark gray in this build......

Nice work.

[Artanis I]

Thanks guys.

I don't see any black or very, very dark gray in this build......

Haha.