15.02.2011

Bridge bashed

A truck carrying a boom lift clipped the Fenny Compton railway bridge this morning near Banbury, Oxfordshire, in the UK, pulling part of it down.

The boom lift, a Genie S-65 owned by local rental company Easi-Uplifts was on the back of a low-loader and stowed correctly. It apparently went under the first bridge which has a 13ft 3inch clearance-height with no problem, but caught the second bridge, which has the same clearance height as it came out from under it.
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The truck caught part of the bridge as it came out

No one was injured in the incident and the damage was limited to the machine and the bridge which carries a disused railway line. The active railway line running on the first bridge was undamaged and trains have apparently continued to run.
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The boom appears to have been stowed correctly

Easi-Uplifts says that it is unable to comment apart from confirming that the accident occurred, that the machine was correctly stowed on the trailer and that the driver had passed underneath the bridge, which is close by the company’s midlands depot, on many occasions before with no problem.

Locally there were suggestions that the bridge which came down had been subjected to earlier damage that might have reduced the clearance height.
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The Fenny Compton rail bridges prior to the accident

Vertikal Comment

This looks like a case of a hanging obstacle that the driver missed, the Genie boom has an 9ft overall height, so in order to catch a 13.3ft (4.0m) bridge the trailer bed had to be 4ft 3 inches high (1.3 metres), which it clearly is not. The fact that it passed beneath the first bridge and then the first half of the second bridge would also seem to confirm this.

However this incident does raise the importance of knowing the overall height of the load and comparing it with the bridge height before passing underneath.

In this case familiarity with the bridge may naturally have caught the driver off guard to some extent – it does look as though there was another unknown factor at play here which a less familiar driver might just have spotted??

Hopefully this is not a case where an earlier driver of a high load has caught the bridge, caused damage and then not reported it.