On the weekend of August 11-12 2007, the Queensway (Highway 417) Island Park Bridge was replaced using a new rapid replacement method. This involved lifting the existing bridges out and replacing them with new bridges that had been prefabricated on a site nearby. The whole process of replacing the bridges could be completed in less than a day as compared to up to 2 years by regular methods.
The MTO has a website with a webcam setup so people could watch the “action”. I decided to grab the images from the website as the action was unfolding and I created the following time lapse video of the Queensway (Highway 417) Island Park Bridge rapid replacement:
- The webcam was updated every 30 seconds (roughly) and the video above is encoded at 5fps. In total it’s about 7 minutes long.
- Unfortunately, the video only starts around 10:30PM as I had some technical difficulty with the images I had captured in the first couple hours. Well, that and I only thought to start capturing after everything had already started.
- The camera operator was moving the camera a lot at times so it can be very difficult to see what is happening during those periods.
- And finally, the compressed video is almost 170MB and the uncompressed one is over 1.8GB so no, I won’t send it to you.
Updated: Oops! It took a few tries to get the flash player to work for me in Wordpress. Also, sorry about the last 45 seconds or so of the video, I didn’t realize I had left in those last frames where nothing was happening.
Pretty cool.
[...] On the weekend of August 2-3 2008, the Queensway (Highway 417) Clyde Avenue Bridge was replaced using a new rapid replacement method. This involved lifting the existing bridges out and replacing them with new bridges that had been prefabricated on a site nearby. The whole process of replacing the bridges could be completed in less than a day as compared to up to 2 years by regular methods. This is the same process that was used last year to replace the Island Park bridge. The MTO had a website with a webcam setup so people could watch the “action”. As I did last year, I grabbed the images from the website as the action was unfolding. The video below is the result of those images and allows you to see what happened. It’s not quite as “exciting” as the Island Park bridge move last year but at least this time the camera is reasonably static. [...]
[...] Time lapse of this entire Island Park Bridge Move project can be seen here as well. [...]