Forth Amendment

Head north out of Edinburgh on the A90 and you’ll soon be treated to one of the British Isles’ most iconic views, and one guaranteed to quicken the pulse of any engineering enthusiast: the Firth of Forth. To your right, the rust-red repeating stretched hexagons of the Forth Bridge, sometimes called Scotland’s equivalent of the Eiffel Tower and one of the most famous examples of Victorian engineering, still carrying trains between Lothian and Fife 122 years after it opened. To the left, the soaring towers of the Forth Road Bridge, in its day the longest suspension bridge outside the US, supporting more than a kilometre of roadway on which 65,000 vehicles travel every day.

But within a few years, the view will be very different, with a third bridge adding to the vista. The Forth Replacement Crossing, for which works are now under way, will span the estuary to the west of the existing road crossing. It’ll look very different from the other two bridges: no curves, just the sharp lines and angles of a cable-stayed bridge, with supporting cables fanning down from three supporting towers in the middle of the water. The bridge will be more than twice as long as the older road crossing, at 2.65km.