More work on Weymouth Town Bridge could clash with Easter holidays
And 'those' temporary railings have now gone
Last updated 9th Dec 2022
Further work is planned on Weymouth harbour’s lifting bridge in April 2023, Dorset Council has confirmed.
The bridge had been shut to traffic from September until the end of November while cracked welds which attach the steel deck plates on the inner harbour side of the bridge were replaced.
Around a quarter of the welds were discovered to be faulty.
The council’s harbours committee was told on Thursday that the next phase of the work, on the other half of the bridge, is now scheduled for April – which could clash with the start of the Easter school holidays and putting floating pontoons back into the harbour in readiness for the summer season.
Assistant Weymouth Harbour Master David Brown told councillors that although the pontoon and bridge works would overlap this was not expected to cause problems. He also confirmed that handrails put up on the bridge had now been removed.
They had been described as “unsightly” and “cheap and nasty” in social media posts calling for their removal from the 92-year-old bridge after they appeared in the final days of the latest bridge repairs.
Portfolio holder Cllr Ray Bryan called for the coming bridge works to be brought forward and for ways to be found to minimise the amount of disruption during the works as he believed the holiday season would start earlier than usual this year – only to be told by harbours committee chairman Mark Roberts that the decision was actually up to him and his highways team, rather than harbour staff.
“In that case it’s something I’ll look at this afternoon,” said Cllr Bryan.
Dorset Council has declined to comment on how much the bridge works have cost so far – claiming the information was commercially sensitive and might affect the price quoted for the second phase of the work.