A Bridge Too Far
My commitment to the education of the great unwashed knows no bounds. Tonight’s subjects are architecture and geography.
Not a lot of people know that the relatively unknown Sydney Harbour Bridge is in fact a cheap replica of a much more famous structure in a much more interesting location:
Sydney Harbour Bridge
Tyne Bridge
In the Dark 
June 11, 2011 at 6:36 pm
Same company was responsible for both if I remember correctly? And maybe the one at Runcorn too?
June 11, 2011 at 6:46 pm
A little Wikipediaing shows that both were based on New York’s earlier Hell Gate bridge.
June 11, 2011 at 7:34 pm
Not true. Geordies travelled backwards in time using the Large Hadron Collider to build that one.
June 11, 2011 at 7:15 pm
It’s on every bottle of Newcastle!
June 11, 2011 at 7:37 pm
Broons aal roond!
June 11, 2011 at 7:16 pm
Have you run out of astronomer look-alikes, to be considering architectural similarities?
Mon
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June 11, 2011 at 7:35 pm
I thought people would be bored with the astronomy ones
June 11, 2011 at 7:45 pm
Building bridges of this design involves first constructing the arch. The deck carrying the road and/or railway follows only when the arch is complete.
When construction work had just started on the Tyne Bridge, a local resident mistook the beginnings of the arch as being the intended shape of the actual bridge. He wrote an irate letter to the Council, complaining that he’d never get his van up a slope that steep.
October 20, 2012 at 9:57 pm
Am I mistaken or have you got the captions the wrong way round on these pictures?
August 6, 2013 at 7:30 pm
you should swap the description of the two images.
The top one is the Tyne Bridge and the bottom one is the Sydney Harbour Bridge.
you screwed up their description.
March 19, 2015 at 10:38 am
well done you got the names wrong the tyne bridge is the top one and a smaller bridge was built at wylam that was a prototype before both and even though sydney harbour bridge was started before the tyne bridge was finished first
March 19, 2015 at 1:44 pm
There’s always someone who doesn’t get the joke.