40 Fun Facts About Forth Bridge

The British saying "like painting the Forth Bridge" describes which kind of job?

A never-ending task is the meaning, from the belief that painters who reached one end had to start again at the other. No such routine ever existed, and a coating finished in 2011 ended regular repainting.

Operation Forth Bridge was the code name for the funeral plans of which member of the British royal family?

Prince Philip was Duke of Edinburgh, so planners named his funeral arrangements after the famous bridge near the city of his title. The plan was set in motion when he died in April 2021.

Which orange soft drink from A.G. Barr used the Forth Bridge on its advertising posters?

Irn-Bru leaned on the bridge to sell itself as a drink as tough as Scottish ironwork. Its recipe really does contain a trace of an iron compound, ammonium ferric citrate.

In which 1935 Alfred Hitchcock thriller does the hero flee a train that police have stopped on the Forth Bridge?

The 39 Steps gave the bridge its most famous screen moment, yet John Buchan's original novel has no such scene. Hitchcock added it, and the 1959 remake kept it.

The Forth Bridge was the first major structure in Britain to be built from which metal?

Steel had only recently become consistent enough for a job this size, thanks to a new furnace process. Three works supplied it, two in Scotland and one in Wales.

What colour is the Forth Bridge painted, in a shade made to match the oxide coating it wore in 1890?

Red is so tied to the structure that the topcoat is named after the bridge itself. The modern paint was specially created to copy the oxide colour the bridge had on opening day.

Which famous landmark was completed in 1889, just one year before the Forth Bridge opened to trains?

The Eiffel Tower took shape in Paris between 1887 and 1889, so the two giants were rising at the same time. It was the tallest structure in the world when it was finished.

At the Forth Bridge's royal opening ceremony, the final rivet driven home was plated with which metal?

Gold plating and a special inscription set the last rivet apart from all the others. The royal guest fixed it from a platform built out on the bridge, then declared the bridge open.

Which RAF fighter shot down raiders over the Forth Bridge during Germany's first air attack on Britain in 1939?

Spitfire pilots from Scotland's part-time auxiliary squadrons brought down the first enemy aircraft of the war over Britain. The bombers were after warships near the bridge, which was left unharmed.

Which status did the Forth Bridge gain in 2015, placing it alongside the Taj Mahal and the Great Wall of China?

World Heritage Site status came from UNESCO, which called the bridge an extraordinary milestone from the age when railways came to dominate long-distance travel. It was Scotland's sixth such listing.

Which bridge design, used for centuries in the East, did the Forth Bridge's engineers scale up to record-breaking size?

Cantilever arms reach out from each of the three great towers and carry short linking spans between them. The idea was old, but nothing on this scale had ever been attempted.

Which future British king opened the Forth Bridge in March 1890 while he was still Prince of Wales?

Edward VII, then heir to Queen Victoria, crossed by train and viewed the bridge from below by steam launch before the ceremony. At the lunch afterwards he announced honours for the men behind it.

Roughly how many rivets were used to build the Forth Bridge, the last one driven by a royal visitor?

6.5 million rivets went into the bridge, and during the restoration finished in 2011 painters coated every one of them by hand before the main coat went on.

Which engineer's design for the Forth Bridge was abandoned after his Tay Bridge collapsed in a storm in 1879?

Thomas Bouch had already seen the foundation stone laid for his own design when the disaster destroyed his reputation. He died the following year, months after the public inquiry blamed him.

Which road bridge, its name chosen by public vote, opened beside the Forth Bridge in 2017?

Queensferry Crossing won the public vote and gave the firth three bridges built in three different centuries. It took motorway traffic away from the 1964 road bridge, which had passed its design capacity.

Trains heading north over the Forth Bridge from the Edinburgh side arrive in which county, nicknamed the Kingdom?

Fife has been called a kingdom since at least 1678, a title often linked to its past as one of the realms of the Picts. Before the bridge, reaching it by rail meant a ferry or a long detour inland.

After the Tay Bridge disaster, the Forth Bridge was designed to withstand far greater pressure from which natural force?

Wind had been badly underestimated on the Tay, so officials set a new rule of 56 pounds per square foot for every bridge. The earlier Forth design had allowed for only 10.

Which Grand Theft Auto game features a copy of the Forth Bridge, renamed the Kincaid Bridge?

San Andreas was made by Rockstar North, a studio based in Edinburgh, a few miles from the real thing. The copy carries trains into San Fierro, the game's take on San Francisco.

The Forth Bridge crosses a firth, a Scots word most often used for which kind of coastal feature?

Estuary is the usual meaning, a place where a river broadens out to meet the sea. The word comes from the same Old Norse root as the Scandinavian fjord.

Which chief engineer of London's Metropolitan Railway, the first underground line, later co-designed the Forth Bridge?

John Fowler earned so much from his London lines that a railway chairman complained no engineer in the world was paid as highly. Finishing the Forth Bridge brought him a baronetcy.

Which Scottish contractor, a former blacksmith's apprentice, built both the Forth Bridge and London's Tower Bridge?

William Arrol started work in a cotton mill at nine and launched his own firm on savings of £85. While the Forth Bridge rose he was also rebuilding the Tay Bridge, splitting each week between the two.

In the famous 1887 human model of the Forth Bridge, the engineer suspended in the middle came from which country?

Japan was home to Kaichi Watanabe, who studied in Glasgow and worked on the bridge as a foreman. In the photograph two seated men play the towers, holding him up with outstretched arms and sticks.

The Forth Bridge lost its world span record to a bridge in which Canadian city, finished after two deadly collapses?

Quebec finally got its bridge after collapses in 1907 and 1916 that cost 88 lives, and it still has the longest span of its type. The Forth Bridge's two great spans remain the second longest of their kind.

What nickname is given to the thousands of men and boys who built the Forth Bridge in the 1880s?

Briggers are remembered by twin bronze memorials, unveiled in 2012 on the two shores, to 73 workers who died. The toll was long given as 57.

Which safety measure, kept ready beneath the Forth Bridge's builders, saved eight men from drowning?

Rowing boats waited under the working areas to pull fallen men from the water. Workers also had to join a Sick and Accident Club, which paid for treatment and supported the widows of men killed.

The towers of the Forth Bridge stand on huge circular piers faced with which stone?

Granite two feet thick faces the piers, which took the first three years of the project to build. Only then could the metalwork begin to rise above the water.

The Forth Bridge completed an unbroken East Coast railway route from London to which Scottish city, the end of the line?

Aberdeen became the finish line of the 1895 Race to the North, when rival companies ran overnight trains flat out from London. A trip of about 13 hours was cut to roughly eight and a half.

The tough coating given to the Forth Bridge in the restoration finished in 2011 came from paint used by which industry?

Offshore oil rigs in the North Sea had already proved the paint system that was adapted for the bridge. It was the first time the whole structure had ever been repainted in one go.

Which small island in the firth, once fortified on the orders of James IV, supports the Forth Bridge's central tower?

Inchgarvie was taken over by compulsory purchase in 1884 because the builders needed more room for materials. Its old fortifications were roofed over to give them extra space.

Which Scottish novelist set his 1986 book The Bridge on a dreamlike, city-sized version of the Forth Bridge?

Iain Banks has his hero crash his car after being distracted by the beauty of the real bridge. The fantasy world of the story is what the man lives through while in a coma.

The Forth Bridge appears on the back of which Bank of Scotland note in the 2007 Bridges of Scotland series?

£20 notes carry the bridge on the back, while the front shows Sir Walter Scott, as every Bank of Scotland note does. He earned the honour by campaigning in 1826 for Scotland's right to keep issuing its own notes.

Which Millennium feature, sponsored by the Royal Bank of Scotland, was fixed to the top of the Forth Bridge in 1998?

Countdown clock displays ticked towards the year 2000 from high on the bridge. The structure had been floodlit only since 1990, when lights were installed to mark its centenary.

The Hougoumont, a cement store ship during Forth Bridge construction, was the last vessel to carry whom to Australia?

Convicts sailed in the ship in 1867, the final transport of prisoners to Australia, and 62 of them were Irish Fenians. Two decades later it held up to 1,200 tonnes of cement for the bridge.

Which naval base, two miles west of the Forth Bridge, sheltered the warships that German bombers attacked in 1939?

Rosyth gave the bridge an odd role in the First World War too: sailors timed their departures and returns by asking when their ship would pass beneath it.

Which iron chambers let men dig the Forth Bridge's underwater foundations, though one tilted and flooded in 1885?

Caissons were floated out and sunk to the seabed, and the deepest were filled with compressed air to keep the water out. The flooded one took ten months to pump dry and dig free.

Decades before the Forth Bridge, what was proposed in 1806 as a weatherproof way for travellers to cross the Forth?

A tunnel scheme came first, planned as a pair of bores with one for each direction of travel. Neither it nor a bridge design of 1818 was built, and the ferries carried on for decades.

Which new technology, carried by a cable laid across the firth, linked the Forth Bridge's three building sites?

Telephone calls joined the yards on both shores with the island in mid-channel. The southern yard also had a drawing loft 200 feet long, where parts could be laid out at full size.

Which railway station just south of the Forth Bridge was rebuilt to open at the same time as the bridge?

Dalmeny replaced an older station on a branch line, which closed the day after the bridge's grand opening. From it the track curves slightly east and runs onto the southern approach viaduct.

The Forth Bridge stood for Scotland on which British coin issued in 2004, in a set showing a bridge for each nation?

One pound coins carried the bridge in 2004, with each country of the United Kingdom represented by a bridge of its own. Three years later it also appeared on a Scottish banknote.

A Clydesdale Bank £5 note marking the Forth Bridge's 125th anniversary was among Britain's first banknotes made of what?

Polymer made Clydesdale the first bank in Great Britain to issue plastic money, in March 2015. The commemorative note has a transparent window with a reflective graphic printed over it.