When painters finish painting the Forth Bridge, they return to the start and begin again. Is this true, or just an urban myth?

sequoianoir

Extracts from http://www.sundayherald.com/26467 IT has become a metaphor for a job that never ends. People will say that a repetitive, never-ending task is 'like painting the Forth Bridge' and, as everyone knows, once the job on the bridge is finished at one end, they start again at the other. Don't they? But a wonderful myth is about to be shattered. The men who paint the bridge -- and so far there are no women here -- don't start again when they've completed the whole job. Indeed the recent history of the Forth Railway Bridge has been mired in stops and starts, which is why the elegant old lady urgently needs a facelift. Now the owners of the bridge, Railtrack, have signed a seven-year contract worth %A350 million to refurbish and paint most of the 112-year-old structure. The glass flake and the pigment react to become waterproof and anti-corrosive. It is applied thickly, covering about two-square metres per litre. But there are more than six million rivets on the bridge and every one will be given a strip coat using a traditional paint brush. Bottomley says the paint has a lifespan of 20 years, so once the contracts are over it will be another 13 years before the painting will be done again. Then the final finish is the famous red colour. Its technical name is Transguard TG168, a nice question for any pub trivia types. Mar 04 03, 2:03 PM