RICHMOND BRIDGE

Geology
The coal River Valley is a down faulted structural valley with two bordering uplifted blocks of
Triassic sediments capped by dolerite.
The valley floor is a basalt lava flow covered by a sequence of river sediments dominantly of
fine sand, silt and clay.
The bridge is sited across a narrow incised valley cut by the Coal River in soft sediments
between two hard rock barriers.
The upper upstream barrier is basalt of tertiary age which is exposed upstream of the bridge
below St. Johns Church cemetery.
The lower rock barrier is dolerite which outcrops downstream of the bridge at the water
supply weir.
The basalt barrier upstream has retreated over time and lag deposits of terrace gravels, silts
and fine sands have been deposited downstream of the retreating basalt.
The lithology and thickness of the sediments at the bridge site is unknown but is considered
to be similar to the unconsolidated sand and clays exposed upstream of the bridge.
Consolidation movements in these sediments after construction probably accounts for the
undulations across the bridge.

Description
Richmond Bridge is a stone arch road bridge.
It is set in the Coal River Valley and links escarpments on the east and
west at the historic town of Richmond.
The bridge was built by convict labour in 1823 to 1825 and is the oldest
surviving large stone arch bridge in Australia.
It has a high degree of integrity.
It is in a particularly picturesque setting and its image has been widely
used in international tourism promotions and has inspired the works of
major Australian artists.
The bridge is on the National Heritage List in recognition of its
outstanding value to the nation.
The bridge continues to be used and is a vital secondary road link to its
area.
It has a 20 tonne load limit and vehicle speed restriction of 40 Km/hr.

Construction
The bridge is constructed of local sandstone and the stonework generally is of random
coursed rough dressed ashlar but the cutwater stones are regular coursed pick faced
dressed, the arch stones are square hammer dressed, the string course at road level is
smooth face dressed and the parapets are random coursed random rubble with smooth face
dressed copings.
The sandstone came from a local quarry on Butchers Hill to the southeast of the town.
Bedding is site soil with pointings providing protection against bedding washout.
The bridge has 4 main semi-circular arches with smaller arches each side and a stone
parapet above a string course.
The arches spring from piers which have sloping fins aligned with the river flow.
Three large sloping cutwaters are an early non original addition.
The bridge is two lane with 7.2m between parapets and length of 41m with arch spans of
4.3, 8.1, 8.3, 8.5 and 4.1m

Geology
The coal River Valley is a down faulted structural valley with two bordering uplifted blocks of
Triassic sediments capped by dolerite.
The valley floor is a basalt lava flow covered by a sequence of river sediments dominantly of
fine sand, silt and clay.
The bridge is sited across a narrow incised valley cut by the Coal River in soft sediments
between two hard rock barriers.
The upper upstream barrier is basalt of tertiary age which is exposed upstream of the bridge
below St. Johns Church cemetery.
The lower rock barrier is dolerite which outcrops downstream of the bridge at the water
supply weir.
The basalt barrier upstream has retreated over time and lag deposits of terrace gravels, silts
and fine sands have been deposited downstream of the retreating basalt.
The lithology and thickness of the sediments at the bridge site is unknown but is considered
to be similar to the unconsolidated sand and clays exposed upstream of the bridge.
Consolidation movements in these sediments after construction probably accounts for the
undulations across the bridge.

Operating Record

Likely designed by Major Bell of the 49th. Regiment with early supervision by him.

Completion by Colonial Architect David Lambe who required that, instead of filling the
extrados of the arches with loose stone rubbish, longitudinal walls be built about
0.6m apart and the spaces be filled with loam

Construction commenced in 1823 with completion variously quoted as September

1824, 1st.January 1825, 1st.April 1825 and 4th. April 1825.

In 1826 The Acting Engineer Tobias Kirkwood reported that the second and third
piers from the opposite bank have settled, the foundation very considerably in as
much that the stonework in both is considerably broken and I am much astonished
that the arch has not been injured.
There is no record of work to this Report but Lambe, in a second opinion Report
advised that all piers excepting the north east bank had settled in foundation and that
the Mill Dam water flow was undermining the piers.

In 1828 the bridge was damaged by floods.

In 1829 John Lee Archer, Civil engineer and Colonial Architect, reported it would be
necessary to rebuild the greater part of two piers and recommended that the
materials collected for rebuilding of the Mill Dam within 50 feet of the bridge be
removed from the bed of the stream.

In 1835 the parapets were raised.

In the 1850s William Rose Falconer, Director of Public Works (1859-1868)

recommended underpinning, river bed excavation and paving placed to form an
inverted arch between the piers.

In 1884 bridge repairs were described in The Traveller Through Tasmania as : The piers are getting cased with stone and brought to a cutwater water edge in line
with the currents course and newly pointed all under and over with cement. The
roadway needs taking up for the top of the masonry to be grouted to throw soakage
to weepholes in the sides instead of percolating through and driving the pointing out
under the arches. It also requires crowning and side drains.
It appears that the paving around the piers in the river bed was also installed at this
time.

No record from 1884 to 1973.

In 1973 a PWD Report noted undercutting of stone adjacent to the pier cutwaters and
recommended spalls be placed on the downstream edge of the stone flagging
together with pointing repairs in 1:1:12 cement mix to bridge stonework so as to not
cause stone damage and that cracking to arches and stone coursing be measured
and recorded.

In April 1977 a 30 km/hr. speed limit was imposed.

In July 1980 kerbs retaining walls and gutter slabs were constructed and the road
and footpaths sealed.

In March 1981 the bridge was cleaned using a 15 aqueous solution of quaternary
ammonium compound followed by fungicide.

In 1985 a 25 tonne load limit applied.

In 1997 A Conservation Plan for the bridge was prepared inclusive of a historical
review and landscape analysis and with Structural and hydraulic appendices.

In 2008 the Conservation Plan was updated.

Managing the Bridge

General
The Transport Division of the Department of Infrastructure, Energy and Resources is
responsible for the ongoing management subject to the approval powers of the
Australian Government under the Environment Protection and Biodiversity
Conservation Act and its Heritage Amendments, the Tasmanian Heritage Council
under the Historic Cultural Heritage Act and the Clarence Council under its Planning
Scheme.
All parties have accepted the Conservation Management Plan as the controlling
document.

Engineering
Management requires that the structural and fabric integrity of the bridge is
maintained.
The bridge is an operating bridge and is subject to loadings never envisaged by its
designers and constructors.
The bridge is deformed ; it has cracks through the masonry with lateral cracks at the
arch centres and arch springing.

Monitoring
The bridge has identified weaknesses with its foundations and the structural
alterations indicate a lack of continuity. The use of site soil bedding gives a material
readily washed out by water leading to loss of structural integrity as bonding between
stones decreases.
Cyclic loads from traffic emphasize the weaknesses and can be expected to increase
cracking and crack widths.
The cracks were recorded in 1973 and sketched in 1985.They are difficult to trace
because of repeated patching. The significant cracking is the lateral cracking of the
arches. There is cracking to the northern face, north east abutment, eastern and
western piers and the vaults of the arches.
The visual monitoring by the Department has found no long term movement in the
cracks.
The 1997 Conservation Plan carried out a structural analysis using the
Cardiff/Transport Road Research Laboratory Masonry Arch Assessment Package.
It was found that Span no. 5 was the most critical using various axle configurations
and truck loads. It recommended the load limit be reduced from 25 tonne to 15 tonne.
Three recent assessments were carried out for the Department by geologist Spry in
1990, engineer Spratt in 1993 and engineer Jordan in 2001.
Both Spratt and Jordan concluded the bridge was in satisfactory structural and fabric
condition. Jordan noted that the Cardiff analysis was conservative and considered
that the new Discrete Element Analysis program would likely indicate a 25 tonne limit
would be safe.
The 2008 Conservation Plan Update major recommendation was that vibration
monitoring be installed in accord with advice of Spratt as a better approach enabling
advance warning of problems.
The Department accepted this recommendation.

Vibration Monitoring
Aim
The present monitoring is visual inspection at intervals. It has the disadvantages of
observing a defect after it has occurred, of being inaccurate and of not being able to
identify the defect cause.
It is desirable to have an automatic monitoring system which gives advance warning,
improved accuracy and which is capable of identifying the cause.
Traffic loads on the bridge give vibrations which move through the structure causing fabric
deflections and movements which may cause cracking or widening of existing cracks.
There has been a large amount of work done on ground vibrations and their effect on
structures particularly with regard to blasting so that comparative data is available.
Vibration measurement has been successfully used in Tasmania by Spratt on the Hagley
Mill to control vibration from both construction and operating traffic.

Test
There are five causes of vibration on the Richmond Bridge.
These causes are:1. Traffic load;
2. Traffic speed;
3. Bedding loss;
4. Foundation and/ or stone movement; and
5. Bridge deck pavement undulations.

Objectives
Determine if vibration monitoring is a practical monitoring tool for bridge
management.
Carry out speed tests to see the impact of speed.
Measure the range of vibration levels experienced under controlled traffic as
well as normal traffic.
Identify areas of the bridge which are sensitive to traffic dynamic loads.
Identify an optimum position of a permanent monitor as well as a reasonable
"alert" vibration level.

Test Procedure
Mount 16 vibration monitors on the inside of the bridge parapets.
The monitors each had a small cable connected back to a computer.
Testing was over an 8 hour period and measured the vertical vibrations set up by
buses, trucks and cars individually and with natural traffic flow.

Monitoring of vertical and transverse

vector components, 3/6/2009

Considerations
There is no published data known to the author on vibration testing of masonry
bridges. Work has been done on steel and concrete bridges to determine stresses
but not as monitoring tool for bridge management.
There are a number of Standards worldwide which relate vibrations to building
damage.
Most, as the Australian Standard, deal with ground vibration from blasting. Others
deal with traffic effects on buildings.
The German standard DIN4150 provides limits below which it is very unlikely that
there will be any cosmetic damage to buildings. For structures that are of great
intrinsic value and are particularly sensitive to vibration, this Standard requires that
transient vibration should not exceed a peak particle velocity of 3mm/s at low
frequencies. The Standard allowable levels increase to 8mm/s at 50Hz and 10mm/s
at 100Hz and above.
This Standard was adopted for the testing.

Test Results
The results are best shown by Table 3.1 extracted from the testing.
Time acceleration data was collected and converted to peak particle velocity using
MATLAB.
The maximum readings were then obtained for each sensor location.
The sensors were located at arch midspan and halfway between.
A Utility was first run across the bridge 5 times in both directions at 30 Km/hr and
then 5 times at 50 Km/hr. to check firstly if reasonably consistent results were
obtained and secondly to determine the effect of speed.
A petrol tanker, bus and loaded tip truck were then run across in both directions at 30
km/hr. No attempt was made to increase the speed to 50 km/hr.
Runs were also undertaken on general traffic when released from the queue. This
gave the bus plus traffic plus cars in both directions with all spans loaded but at low
speed.
A water ingress pavement failure was noted adjacent to location 1.

Initial controlled tests with ute, repeated 4 times each way, at

30 km/h and then 1 time at 50 km/h,
(while other traffic is halted for the procedure), 3/6/2009
Note the seepage at tarmac failure after previous nights rain.

Tanker truck passes each way for controlled test, 3/6/2009

The tests demonstrate that :

No vibration was measured above 3mm/second.

It is considered that vehicles obeying the speed limit and with reasonable loads are
not causing any damage to the bridge.
The bridge dominant frequency response is 8.5Hz.This will alter if structural cracking
increases. Dynamic loading of this frequency should be avoided.
Given the known irregularities in the bridge stonework, the results are usefully
consistent.
It is clear that the east end of the bridge and the centre of the east river span location
7 consistently return the highest vibration. This is in accord with the structural testing
previously carried out. The structural testing attributed this to the decreased depth of
arch of this span. The vibration testing shows only that this is the most sensitive
location and indicates the need to use the result to find the cause.
All of the arch centres gave high vibrations for the tip truck.
Loaded trucks to this configuration are shown to be vehicles requiring attention.
Centre of arch location 1 on the west gave high readings for the utility at 50km/hr.,
the tanker, bus and tip truck.
There is a longitudinal pavement failure due to water ingress close to this location.
The pavement failure is considered to be the cause of the high vibrations.
Speed has a very large impact on vibration as measured by the speed variation
testing with the utility. A speed of 50 km/hr gives readings nearly double that of 30
km/hr.
With speed shown to be very important it is worth noting that the east side of the
bridge with its straight stretch allows of higher approach speed to the bridge on this
side.
It is then essential to have effective speed management on this approach.

Conclusions
Vibration monitoring has been shown
by the test to be a practical bridge
management tool.
It has identified the most sensitive
location on the bridge, the effect of
speed, the effect of a pavement failure
and the vehicle requiring closest
attention.

All effects, excepting the pavement

failure, would be identified by vibration
sensors mounted on the east side river
span arch.

It would require sensors on each arch

to give complete coverage of the bridge
for all events.