Sheppey Crossing
| Sheppey Crossing | |
|---|---|
 |
|
| Coordinates | 51°23′26.20″N 00°44′49.76″E / 51.3906111°N 0.7471556°E |
| Carries | Four lane dual carriageway highway |
| Crosses | The Swale (a strait in the North Sea) |
| Locale | Isle of Sheppey, Kent, England |
| Characteristics | |
| Design | beam bridge |
| Total length | 1.3km |
| Width | 21 metres (70 feet) |
| Longest span | 92.5m |
| Clearance above | 35 metres (115 feet) |
| History | |
| Construction cost | ₤30 million |
| Opened | 3 July 2006 |
The Sheppey Crossing is a bridge which carries the A249 road across The Swale (a strait in the North Sea), linking the Isle of Sheppey with mainland of Kent. The four-lane crossing measures 21.5 m (71 feet) in width, at a height of 35 m (115 feet) over the water. The A249 links the M20 and M2 motorways to Sheppey. The bridge opened in 2006, and it provides an alternative highway to the neighbouring Kingsferry Bridge that was completed in 1959.
The Sheppey Crossing is not open to pedestrians, bicycles, or horses, and these continue to use the older bridge, as does the railway line to Sheerness. Both bridges are monitored by an automatic number plate recognition (ANPR) system to detect lawbreaking vehicles.
The bridge was constructed as part of a £100 million plan to improve the A249 between the M2 and the port of Sheerness. The Kingsferry Bridge, which previously carried the A249, suffers from two major drawbacks: It has only one lane in each direction and as traffic to and from the island increased over time it became a bottleneck. Secondly, it is a vertical-lift bridge. It needs to be raised regularly to allow marine traffic to pass under it, leading to lengthy traffic delays. Before its opening, it was estimated that 26,000 vehicles a day would use the new crossing.
The bridge was designed by Cass Hayward and Capita Symonds, and won the 2007 IStructE Award for Transportation Structures. Around 10,000 tonnes of steel was used in construction, which was carried out by Carillion under a private finance initiative contract, was made more difficult because many of the bridge's piers had to be built on marshland. A jacking mechanism was employed to move the sections of roadway into position from each end of the bridge, with the final two sections of deck (piers 7 and 8 and piers 15, 16, and 17) lifted into place during November 2005.
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