Bridges

Today, we left Sete and headed north west aiming for Caen where we are due to catch our ferry tomorrow. Tonight we are staying in Bourges which is roughly half way. En route to Bourges, we passed some lovely countryside including a couple of historic bridges. The main blip is the Garabit Viaduct and the extra is the Miliau Viaduct.

The first (the Garabit Viaduct) was built by world famous French engineer Eiffel. Interestingly enough, it was built at roughly the same time as the Forth Rail bridge. With a single track in November 1885, the viaduct was 565 m (1,854 ft) long and weighed 3,587 tonnes (3,530 long tons; 3,954 short tons). Even more impressively, the actual deflection (load displacement) was measured at 8 millimetres (0.315 in), just what had been calculated by Eiffel. At 124 m (407 ft) above the river, the bridge was the world's highest arch bridge when it was built.[3][4] The overall project cost was 3,100,000 francs.

The second is the Millau Viaduct, the world's tallest bridge, which spans the Tarn River and the Tarn Valley in the central-south region of France. At 1,025 feet tall, and 8,071 feet long, it is a stunning architectural and design feat. Again, to me it looks not unlike the new road bridge which spans the Forth near Edinburgh.

Opened in 2004 to close the "missing link" on the A75 autoroute that connects Paris in the north to Perpignan in the south, the Millau Viaduct was the result of 17 years of ideas, proposals, and design that resulted in shaving 37 miles off the former route through the region. But rather than choose a mundane design that simply did the job, the French went big. Very big. It was designed by UK designer Norman Foster.