Of all the things I've done in this hobby, on reflection bridges seem to stand out the most. I remember them individually in great detail, each with their individual purpose and tailored engineering. Webs of latticed steel, rust, dirty hands, flakes of paint. Pigeon shit, the smell of machine oil, the rush of the wind, the rumble of traffic. Moments where you're convinced you've been had turn into long minutes of waiting for people to move on, followed by a gasping for breath from the exertion it has taken to pull yourself up the epic doom ladder or to renegotiate whatever personalised security measures the beast has and bail down the last flight of stairs to that beautiful, gorgeous, solid ground.
At the time of my first ascent of a transporter bridge, the Middlesbrough one in late 2011, I had no idea that there were three in the UK. In fact, I really had no idea whatsoever as to whether there were a lot more of them, or if this was the only one. I was pretty indifferent. And I wasn't too good with heights. All the same, Bordello was coming up North, and seeing as the high stuff has always been his thing, I pointed both the bridges in Middlesbrough out to him and we did them one night with a mate from home, having bashed out a few drains beforehand further south.
Middlesbrough Transporter Bridge
Once I got home I did some reading, and it was to my great interest to discover that the big blue thing we had climbed the evening previous was 12.5% of all of the ones in the world. And 37.5% of them were in the UK! (3 in the UK, 8 in the world, I see you counting on your fingers there.) Now, 3 is a nice number of things to collect, and with Bordello cracking out the southernmost of the transporters with Larey a few months later I decided I wanted them. I think it was mid august when I persuaded my housemate to drive down to Warrington with me, and we somehow managed to get Dempsey to come down too. (He must've sensed potential photobombing material)
Warrington Transporter Bridge
Shame, turns out its a total derp! Demps managed to knock a board out of the walkway which clattered all the way down and I though we'd lost him until I realised he was just hiding behind a large girder, poking only the top half of his face out at me. Business as usual.
So finally there's Newport. Bordello was based in Cardiff so it was basically all about getting some time off to go down and play out as well as ticking this one off, screwing the Uk transporter list up and hurling it a few hundred feet from the top into the river Usk. Metaphorically. Happily it was Shocktactics' birthday the other day and we met up with Bordello and Total to chill and mess about for a week in South Wales. All three of the others had done it before, the Wales contingent having hammered this one particularly hard over the last year or so and so it was a very relaxed, pretty hilarious affair. I'll spare you the details.
Newport Transporter Bridge
I framed this one up and sorted my exposure out, then just before I pushed the shutter these two goons decided they fancied a lie-down in the middle of my picture. Tsk, tourists.
And that's the UK 3. As much as I'd like to say that's a job done, the idea of scaling all eight does seem a tempting proposition, especially considering the beauty of some of the European ones. One for the even longer term perhaps... There seems to be somewhat of a race on. Not that I'm too bothered about that, otherwise I'd be catching up, always catching up. It's just that 8 is an even nicer number of things to have than 3.
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