Tales of the unexpected

Our aim when we launched this website was to recognise and reflect the natural fascination people of all ages have with building big bridges. You don’t have to be an infrastructure geek to get a huge kick out of spectacular towers rising hundreds of metres above the wide waters of the Forth.

Naturally, the next question is "how do they do that?"… and we’re doing our best to explain and show you that as things progress. But we also need to ask another question: who are “they”?

That’s why we’ve started publishing in-depth and informal interviews with key figures from our project team, starting with the two men at the head of the project, David Climie and Michael Martin, project directors for the client and contractor respectively.

Building the Forth Replacement Crossing (which includes the Queensferry Crossing and a total of 12 miles of new or upgraded roads) requires a broad range of world class skills. This might be sound like a cliché but make no mistake, you don’t build cutting-edge structures on this scale, in this kind of environment, without being among the best at what you do and having experience at doing it. Not surprisingly this means our team includes many different nationalities, although to be fair, you’re never that far from a Scottish accent!

We’ll talk to as many people as we can before the project is complete. Each of them has a fascinating story to tell, a different route into engineering, a different career path leading to the Queensferry Crossing involving work in every corner of the globe. Despite the worldwide project experience, many of these paths have crossed before. Unplanned clandestine trips behind the Iron Curtain, exploding NASA rockets and military engineering in war zones will all feature, among other things.

Ultimately, we hope these profiles help inspire the young engineers of today to make the most of their careers and recognise the world of opportunity that civil engineering represents… and, hopefully, we can also capture the imagination of our potential engineers of the future too.

We hope you enjoy meeting the team.