The innovative use of concrete by the LMS railway

Abstract

The various railway companies in Britain and Ireland were very reluctant to use reinforced concrete in bridge decks that carried trains before about 1950. This paper looks at a remarkable exception to the rule, the railway north of Belfast that became part of the English LMS. To run it, a body called the Northern Counties Committee (NCC) was set up that operated with considerable independence. As early as 1911, the engineers of the NCC were replacing timber bridge decks with precast concrete slabs. As spans increased, they next used slabs with two attached beams and then individual T beams that became larger as their experience in the use of reinforced concrete grew. Once the use of concrete was accepted, it was used for a variety of other purposes, notably for precast buildings. In 1933, a cut-off line was constructed that included a massive viaduct at Greenisland; this has been claimed as constituting the largest concrete work in Britain or Ireland to that time. The paper ends with some indications as to how this experience was brought to the parent LMS Railway Company as the Irish engineers were successively moved to London after 1930.