General   (General discussion, talk about anything.)

Jo Anne said:

"Adam Bridge says “Built by Greater Manchester County Council 1983”"

I will explain how that bridge came to be built in 1983.

Up until those times the bridge was just a single carriageway in each direction, no wider than any other bridge of that type, and the Saddle bottleneck as it was called, was caused by three main roads, Warrington Road, Victoria Street (Billinge Road) and Ormskirk Road being funnelled into a single lane to go over the River Duggy, in the early 1970s a fourth road was added to the mix, in the shape of a direct route from the Cherry Gardens roundabout, to Newtown via a newly built bridge over the WCML joining the Spencer Roads and the extension of Scot Lane to Beech Hill Avenue, and the Construction of Robin Park Road from Scot Lane to the Saddle Junction, the original intention would have to been to join with the Wigan Northern M6 Link Road to the motorway at Standish,
but Woodhouse Drive was the only bit of that road to be built.

So in the mid to late 1970s, it was still thought that the Wigan Wallgate to Liverpool Exchange line, as it was known in those days, would be closed and the Seven Stars and the Skew Bridge, bridges would be demolished, as they carried the same Wigan Wallgate to Liverpool Exchange line over them, and after demolition of those bridges, that would have enabled the dual carriageway from Goose Green to be extended up to Wallgate and Pottrey Road, thus having a dual carriageway from the M6 into Wigan Town Centre, that being the Wigan Southern M6 Link Road.

But the bridge over the River Douglas would have to be widened to take the dual carriageway through to Wallgate, joining at the canal bridge and Pottrey Road at the same location.

So to please Tonker, I can tell you that the bridge was not built in 1983, two thirds or thereabouts of that bridge was built in 1983, because whilst they built the new bridge, they kept the road open using the old bridge, and they just joined the new part of the bridge to the old part, but the edges of the bridges and the parapet walls, were offset, the parapet wall on the old side pointed towards the railway bridge as it had always done so, but the parapet wall on the new bridge side actually pointed at an angle, and it still does towards the railway embankment, it lining up with the straight section of Pottrey Road, which is where the section of dual carriageway from Pottrey Road, would have run through from, joining up with the new part of the bridge, but the railway line did not close, and to bring the dual carriage way from Goose Green into Wigan, it would have required two new much wider bridges to be built at Skew Bridge and at the Seven Stars, and to give some idea of how wide those bridges would have had to be, then look at the width of the Spencer Road railway bridge, that was built as a dual carriageway over the WCML although the second lane as now been converted into a cycle lane, but it would have consisted of two pavements, four carriageways and a central reservation, just like the Spencer Road bridge, and you would have been looking at something not much different in size, to the bridge over Chapel Lane, very expensive and it would have been down to Wigan Council to provide or find the funding for those bridges, hence they never got built.

The road orientation over the bridge was altered when the Gyratory was built in 1999 and it was again altered when Southgate was built in 2013

I bet Tonker reading this is getting annoyed