grandad kit

Thank you for reading my blog. If you have difficulty seeing your grandchildren, or have any views about my situation, I would welcome your messages by e-mail through this blog site. If you wish, just use a first name or a nickname and your identity will be protected, like mine – “Grandad Kit.”

Dear “Tom”

Building a bridge

I am your other grandfather, the one you have never met. You are three years old, and although I have never met you, I love you dearly and always will. You are my flesh and blood, and always will be. We will meet one day, I am sure. I am writing this daily "blog" to you to make up for the fact that I can't speak to you right now. I hope that one day you will be able to read this and then you will know that Grandad Kit and Nana Ann always did care for you, right from the day you were born.

If Grandad had been able to take you for a walk yesterday, I would have taken you to where they are building a new bridge over a river. Not a big river, but big enough. Actually, I like to go and have a run past it every so often, to see how it is coming along.

Grandad used to build bridges just like that. Not actually build them personally, but I was in charhe of all the men and I had to make sure the bridge was built exactly so. Because if a bridge isn't built exactly so, it could fall down! This has actually happened in a few cases, but forntunatley not with any of the bidges I have built.

The first thing you look at is what carries the bridge over the river. Usually, as in this case, the main things that carry the load are steel beams. They're called I-beams, because they are shaped like the letter I. If you look at the end of the beam, you will see what I mean.

Then these beams have to rest on something very firm and very strong on either bank. They're called the abutments because they "abut" onto the bridge at either side. Agin, if the abutments aren't strong enough, the bridge could slide to one side or the other. Abutments are usually made of three strong walls on concrete, like a box with three sides. The open side is where the bridge joins onto the road on each bank. These concrete boxes are filled in with stones, which you could see riight now.

Then there's got to be railings on either side of the rbidge, to stop people falling into the water! Again, these have to be strong, just in case a car or a lorry were to crash into them and maybe go right through and down into the river with a big splash. That would be very dangerous. So tghe fences, called parapets, have to be built just so, like the brideg itself.

The cleverest thing is where the steel beams rest on the abutments on either side of the river. I can take you underneath to show you. You'll see that, inbetween the steel beams and a sort of shlf on each abutment, there is a thing that looks like a big square sandwich. Well it is a sandwich of sorts, but not made out of bread and jam! But is is "sandwiched" bewteen the baem and the abutment, and it's made of steel and very, very strong rubber. Yes, rubber! And the whole thing is stuck together with glue - a very special glue of course.

As well as the steel and rubber "sandwich" and the glue, there are bolts that a stuck onto the bottom of each beam at ecah end. These slot into holes drilled in the sandwich, just to make doubly sure they don't slide out and let the rbidge down with a bump. If you were here, I could arrange for you to see the beams lifted p by a big crane and slotted into place - that's really exciting.

So whenever we see a bridge, I can take you underneath and show you how it is made.

Love from

Grandad Kit and Nana Ann