The Laredo International Bridge 1 is one of four road bridges that cross the Rio Grande to connect the cities of Laredo, USA and Nuevo Laredo, Mexico.

The 320 m long bridge is officially known as the Gateway to the Americas International Bridge (Wikipedia) and, as we can see from this satellite shot, the sheer volume of cars waiting to get into the states really help it to live up to its name – nearly a million cars cross this bridge each year, albeit slowly.

There’s a webcam on the American side that shows a typical American street scene, while the webcam on the Mexican side seems to always show a scene very similar to what we can see in the satellite shot.

In the webcams you might also spot one of the 4 million pedestrians who cross the bridge on foot each year.

Laredo International Bridge 2, or officially the Juárez-Lincoln International Bridge (Wikipedia), was built in 1976 to alleviate traffic on the first bridge, and is only open to buses and non-commercial traffic.

Slightly shorter at 307 m it has six lanes, four or which head north into the US. All four northbound lanes appear to be continually gridlocked, which is hardly surprising when you hear that over 4 million non-commercial vehicles cross here every year.

Google’s Street View car never got close enough to see the bridge itself, but we can see the front of the border control building from a distance.

Next up is the Laredo International Bridge 3, or Colombia-Solidarity International Bridge (Wikipedia), which has eight lanes this time and of all the bridges so far carries the most commercial traffic – around 270,000 vehicles each year.

Our final road bridge is the Laredo International Bridge 4, or World Trade International Bridge (Wikipedia), which despite also having eight lanes, is only open to commercial vehicles – a LOT of them. In the past year this bridge has been crossed by nearly 1.2 million commercial vehicles.

It’s not only road bridges that connect the two countries here either – there’s also the Laredo International Railway Bridge, or Texas-Mexican Railway International Bridge (Wikipedia) which connects the Texas Mexican Railway in the US with Mexico’s Kansas City Railway.

Ironically, unlike the road bridges, the Google Street View car got close enough to the railway bridge for a photo opportunity.

As if that wasn’t enough bridges, plans are already underway for the construction of yet another road bridge and two more railway bridges.

For the full breakdown of statistical data about these bridges, see this traffic distribution chart at cityoflaredo.com.

Congratulations to Fraser, who finally got a suggestion published.

Is it a giant turd? Is it Superman? No, it’s a train! Made entirely from bricks!

See, seriously. A train made from bricks, and all in the name of art apparently.

The brainchild of sculptor David Mach, the brick train cost around £760,000, contains 185,000 bricks and took 34 brickies a total of 21 weeks to build. Modeled on the 1938 record-setting “Mallard” steam train, the art work is presumably supposed to pay some sort of homage to Darlington’s rich railway heritage, but nevertheless caused controversy when it was unveiled in 1997.

Would any of you keen sightseers like to comment about what you think the artist was on, er… I mean, what the artist’s intentions were, when he decided to make this?

Here’s some more info, and a ground-level photo.

Thanks to Alex McGlashan.

It’s Island Week 3 here at GSS, which means we’ll mostly be posting about Islands. It’ll probably last about a week.

Lindisfarne is a tidal island, off the north-east coast of England, which thanks to having been home to a monastery since the 7th century AD, is also known as Holy Island.

The causeway that connects Lindisfarne to the mainland is flooded twice a day by the tide (you can see the tidemark on this section of the road), so drivers must be careful about when they start to cross. Refuge places are provided for the cars should they become stranded by quickly rising water.

Before the advent of cars those wishing to reach the monastery would have had to cross the sands on foot at low tide. Known as Pilgrim’s Way, we can see the markers that still define that path today, as well as small refuge boxes for those who choose a foolish time to attempt the walk.

Here’s the second refuge box on the Pilgrim’s Way, but following the markers along there are no people to be seen, probably because a large section of the path is under water.

Where the Pilgrim’s way finally meets land we find a nice modern-day maze of, er… something, and just south of here we finally come across the ancient ruins of the island’s monastery.

To the east of the monastery, we can also see the small Lindisfarne Castle and the old castle limekilns, which are in the care of the National Trust and open to visitors.

Elsewhere on the island there are monuments, some spectacular sections of coastline, lots of sand, and there’s even a lake for all you recursion junkies.

There’s more about the long history of Lindisfarne at Wikipedia, or have a look at this PDF of the island’s sights.

See also the previously featured Mont Saint Michel tidal island.

Especially for Spamboy.

Tinsley Viaduct is a two-tier road bridge in Sheffield, England; the first of its kind in the UK. It carries the M1 motorway over a 1033 metre section of the Don Valley, and is one of Sheffield’s most prominent landmarks. Sadly there’s not much to see from our viewpoint.

Fortunately for us however, the Tinsley Viaduct runs right past the Tinsley Towers, a fantastic pair of defunct cooling towers. Due to their extremely close proximity to the viaduct, they were left standing when the power plant they served was demolished in the 70s.

As it happens, “extremely close” is a bit of an understatement – the nearest tower stands only 12 metres from the M1!

Actually, “stood” is the correct term I’m afraid.

Following years of strengthening work to the viaduct (and presumably advances in demolition technology), the towers were finally brought down¹ in the early hours of Sunday the 24th August. You can watch a video of the spectacular destruction of the towers over at the BBC.

Thanks to Radio 2 and the ever informative Jonathan Rawle.

When Google recently added street view for vast stretches of empty road across the middle of Australia, most people didn’t expect to find much of interest out there.

To be fair, those people were mostly right. However, every now and again the street view car did indeed pass something at least. In the deserts of South Australia on the Stuart Highway, we can see an approaching truck. Actually, it’s a really big truck!

Hang on, is that another truck driving dangerously close behind the first one? Nope, the first massive truck is actually pulling another trailer which carries… another truck – followed by another trailer!

The sign on the back of the huge vehicle kindly explains that this is a “ROAD TRAIN” – a kind of trucking used in remote areas of Australia, the United States, and Western Canada to move huge loads across vast distances. In the U.S. and Canada the terms “triples,” “Turnpike doubles” and “Rocky Mountain doubles” are more commonly used.

This particular road train is a “triple”, and is also “doubled-up” (carrying empty road train trailers), but some of these vehicles pull up to 4 trailers at a time. Australia has the largest and heaviest road-legal vehicles in the world, with some weighing up to 200 tonnes.

Previously on Google Sightseeing: Trucks Pulling Trucks

Thanks to Virtual Globe Trotting