Brighton Pier – Sussex

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Brighton Pier - Sussex

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If you’ve ever been on a seaside pier, in this case Brighton Pier, and looked up at the massive rides and associated structures, and then looked down at slatted wooden walkways and wondered how the devil they got all of that that very heavy kit a hundred metres or more from the terra firma well I can now tell you. Somewhat unsurprisingly… roadplates, and lots of them.

The principle is straightforward enough. A solid steel plate can transfer a point load from a roller, wheel or machinery skate, across a much bigger surface footprint, thus massively reducing the strain on a localised area. Particularly one that was specified when Queen Victoria was still on the throne and wasn’t really meant to carry anything more massive than a portly Edwardian Dame carrying an ice cream.

But being a structure with a safe working capacity in terms of total supported loads, rather than solid or semi solid ground, the overall mass of any load spreading system being added must be carefully considered and quantified. Together with the project manager a minimum thickness was calculated, in this case 2.50 x 1.25 x 12 mm skate plates.

Then an overall safe mass capacity for the pier supports could be divided by the the mass of each panel and give a maximum quantity of plates that could be laid out at any one time. This was important, because the more that could be used, the longer the available runway = quicker transfer times for each one of the modules. The last thing the engineers needed was to be wasting valuable night-shift working time, bumping plates around.

Some of the plates were delivered by the lightweight 3.5 tonne drop side c/w HIAB (Lorry Loading Crane) saving time for the install.