On 29 May, 14:04, " wrote:

On 29 May, 11:07, "Richard J." wrote:

Latest report from the BBC at
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/london/7424980.stm:

"A Transport for London spokesman said 'just debris from engineering works'
fell on the tracks rather than a partial bridge collapse as reported
earlier.
'The contractors were jacking up the bridge. The jack collapsed and debris
from the supports for the bridge fell onto the tracks. We are investigating
the incident,' he said."


There's lots more about this from lots of different sources
http://news.google.co.uk/nwshp?hl=en...998631&topic=h

What interests me is the comment that the contractors were jacking the
bridge up - AND THERE WERE TRAINS RUNNING AT THE TIME !!!

What on earth is their safety case like ?


I think you (and Roland Perry upthread) may well be jumping to
conclusions - just because many reports say that the bridge was being
jacked up at the time doesn't mean that was what was actually
happening.

It is indeed a bit hard to believe that anything like that was going
on whilst trains were running below, so perhaps Mr Thant's post
upthread might help to explain matters - this is what he had to say...

On 29 May, 12:41, Mr Thant
wrote:

It might have been that they jacked it up the night before and were
only swapping over the bearings (which is what I think they were
doing) during the day.

See:
http://groups.google.co.uk/group/uk....212667d5c7a14e