Twin Sails Bascule Bridge raising, Poole, Dorset

Date filmed: 23/06/2021
Video filmed at 16:42
Location: A350 Twin Sails Bridge, Poole
Activation sequence starts at 0:11
Bridge begins to raise at 1:00
Bridge is fully raised at 5:30
Bridge begins to lower at 7:27
Barriers raise at 10:00
A very unique lifting bridge located within the town of Poole near Bournemouth in Dorset, filmed during a sunny and warm Summer's day on one of its hourly scheduled raises. This is one of two lifting bridges located within Poole, and is opened whenever vessels with tall masts wish to proceed into or out of the harbour. If there are any vessels wishing to proceed, one of the two bridges will fully cycle its sequence, before the second bridge fully cycles its sequence as soon as possible afterwards, and once this is done, the bridge that raised initially will raise again to let the vessels continue further. Which bridge will raise first is usually defined by the time of day, for instance, the Harbour Bridge raised first in the evening.
This lifting bridge itself is divided diagonally, so that when each section separates, the shapes resemble two sails, which is where the bridge rather obviously gets its name from. This is a very unique design, which has quite a lot more character and is quite a lot more recognisable than other lifting bridges in the country. During this opening, the bridge took around four and a half minutes to fully raise, and just over two minutes to fully lower, and each section of the bridge appeared to raise very slowly. When fully opened, the structure is incredibly tall and can be seen from all across the harbour in Poole. The bridge, as well as the entire road around and across it, was opened to the public in 2012, and apparently has a lot of reliability issues.
To warn drivers and pedestrians, there are four LED sets of lights here which are very similar to the kinds seen on level crossings, and each of the four of these is located in one of four odd-looking assemblies, which in turn house one barrier for the road and one barrier for the footway, so in total, there are eight barriers at this bridge - four for vehicles and four comparatively tiny barriers for pedestrians - which were all manufactured by Newgate. The audible alarm here comes in the form of one Nexus 'Claxon' alarm within each warning assembly too, a total of four here. These are reasonably noisy and are located just beneath each wigwag though hardly visible through the metallic mesh covering. These sound when the barriers lower and when the barriers raise, as is the case with other lifting / moving bridges.
In total, the full cycle of the bridge's sequence took just under ten minutes, and has been left un-cut for this video, filmed in 4K, so you can see the whole sequence from start to finish.
Thanks for watching!

[@maimadha]

Great video

[@SouthEastLevelCrossings]

Thanks!

[@trainsdu4940]

Undoubtedly the most unique lifting bridge in the UK. I want to see more swing/lifting bridge on your channel besides the classic level crossing videos ;)

[@SouthEastLevelCrossings]

Definitely! It's probably my favourite lifting bridge I've filmed thus far. I do have another bridge video on the schedule, and I will try and film more whenever I can 👍👍

[@trainsdu4940]

I forgot to ask, are there level crossings in the UK that have those kind of alarms?

[@SouthEastLevelCrossings]

Level crossings in Preston on the Ribble Steam railway have this kind of alarm I believe

[@UKLevelCrossingsChannel]

Great video and great bridge 😁

[@SouthEastLevelCrossings]

Thanks very much! 👍👍

[@HarryPat13Channel]

Why did the barriers just lowered when the activation came?

[@SouthEastLevelCrossings]

Could be that as the bridge operator saw it was clear, they decided to lower the barriers very shortly after the reds turned on.

[@TrainspottingTrini]

Huh this bridge had a very different lowering sequence in a different video

[@SouthEastLevelCrossings]

Yeah it's strange. I think it's because there's no fixed sequence here and each corner is operated individually

[@NELincsTrainspotting]

Great video of a nice bridge. Are the alarms here YA30?

[@SouthEastLevelCrossings]

Thanks very much! They're not YA30s, they're Nexus Claxon alarms I think (couldn't quite make out what they were)

[@samuelfellows6923]

🤨 - There was another horn speaker underneath the boat traffic light cluster, ?

[@jix177]

Nice but a terrible design for car chases. You'd never be able to jump a car over that bridge when it's halfway opened, no matter how fast you drive.

[@SouthEastLevelCrossings]

Maybe that's one of the things they had in mind when they designed it haha.