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.
Updated: Oops! 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.