Double checked another report to ensure the images weren't A.I. but unfortunately this is real. Looks to be that scour has felled one of the masonry piers supporting one of the smaller steel spans.

Mark

https://www.pressandjournal.co.uk/fp/news/6915286/river-spey-viaduct-collapse/

 
More on the viaduct from the Forgotten Relics web site.

Mark

http://www.forgottenrelics.org/bridges/spey-viaduct/

 
Ah. The piers are not masonry, each pier for the approach spans is a pair of concrete-filled iron cylinders sunk to... bedrock(?) and clad in masonry, and for the supports in question, both have failed. The water is esturine and the mode of failure will prove to be informative for other similar structures. But, especially given their concrete cores, perhaps not corrosion - looking at old OS mapping, the deep water channel of the river has shifted and now bears on and surrounds the failed piers so it may be that they've simply been washed out of the ground.

Mark

 
More photos here from Facebook.

Mark

https://www.facebook.com/groups/5847179865409002/permalink/24998004463233255/

 
If you have Google Earth, you can use the menu 'View/Historical imagery' for the bridge site, allowing you to leaf through a striking set of aerial images from c.1985 to the present day, showing that from 2020 the river's main channel at the bridge switched to the west bank of the Spey for what appears to be the first time in the history of the structure. It may be that 2023's Storm Babet prompted some of this.

This might prove to be a reminder that some events that we like to think of occuring at rates that we'd think of as 'Geological' with respect to time spans can actually happen quickly - long periods of quiescence and then a short spell of rapid change.

Mark

 
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c1m87jlv97ro


Photographs in the article.

 
In 2024, a timely FOI request to Moray Council.

Mark

http://www.moray.gov.uk/moray_standard/page_155535.html

 
I have merged two topics on the subject into one purely in the interests of clarity and ease of future reference for our readers (or whatever phrase that bloke from Nailsea uses) .
 

 

I think the pattern of channels has been a lot more variable than that. As the linked "Forgotten Relics" article says, it was intended to protect the bridge foundations by confining the flow to the main span. But the river had other ideas, and immediately started switching its path when the river was in spate (pretty common).

The Duke of Richmond and Gordon went to court to get the GNoSR to do more to block the side arches, a case that was settled without a ruling, so it's not clear what the result was. Equally unclear is why the big local landowner wanted to favour commercial fishing by blocking the river's flood channels, and so cause the river upstream to burst its banks!

In practice the argument seems to have been about how big a flood should be kept in the main channel, before being allowed to spread wider, and who was to rebuild the cills under the side arches after the flood had broken through them. Certainly it looks as if at some stage, probably long before the railway closed, people gave up trying to bully the river. So it's been shifting the stuff that held the piers upright ever since.

 

Erm ... excuse me ?!?

 
Hopefully a new very light weight section - bridging the fallen piers - can restore the path and cycleway.

 
Yes, the ~65 metre steel span needed is very achievable and hopefully the piers either side of the failed ones are sound. It might need to be scoped to enable a certain amount of access by vehicles in the interests of future maintenance of the rest of the structure.

Access to the site is an issue though as that would need a temporary road built to the site.

Initially it might seem to be an extravagance to repair this, but the other options are also expensive and offer no benefits other than to reduce/remove the liability.

To remove just the damaged spans and piers - that's expensive in itself and still needs the temporary access road - and leaves the rest of the structure to become a liability in its own time.

So, option 3 - removing the entire structure - means, among oher things, dealing with that centre span, at 368 feet it's over 40 feet longer than each of the Severn Rail bridge's two large spans - it even manages to be 8 feet longer than the two warren truss spans - between the three cantilevers of the Forth Rail Bridge. For good measure it's awkwardly placed in the middle of a wild and shallow river with no road or rail access.

The only positive for that operation must be that there's nothing nearby to damage while the span is dropped into the river by explosives, cut up by... whatever's used to cut up scrap steelwork in a river bed - and then removed from site. But... while that was ok for the Severn Bridge's big spans in the sixties, given the likely surface coatings on the Spey viaduct, environmental legislation would rule that out completely. So, would it be a matter of encasing the span, propping it, chopping it piece by piece and taking it back to dry ground over the remaining structure? That's an approach which has introduced the need for more expense in the form of a second temporary access road at the east end of the bridge....

Mark