The back page of the magazine "World Highways" is usually worth a glance - it describes some of the amusing things which are bound to happen when hundreds of millions of people around the world use or misuse the world's roads.

One such was in the March issue. It described the collision of a pick-up truck driven by an man from Oklahoma with a full-grown elephant, escaped from a circus. The driver's excuse was that he hadn't seen it!

However, an equally dazzling display of myopia comes in one of the articles earlier on, one about the Forth Road Bridge, north of Edinburgh, which has been known for some time to be in need of replacement.

The article says, "Overall, though, the fate of the Forth Road Bridge provides a case in point for all older bridges around the world. The existing bridge was designed in the 1950s and built to high engineering standards, opening to traffic in 1964. However the bridge now has to cope with considerably higher volumes of traffic than it was designed for. In addition, the maximum GVW of trucks using the bridge has more than doubled since the link was opened."

Ahem.

It seems somehow to have escaped the writer's notice that, just upstream of the Forth Road Bridge is The Forth Bridge, that iconic memorial to Victorian engineering.

Parenthetically, its iconic status is attested to by the fact that the bridge carrying the railway is always described as The Forth Bridge: it is the adjacent road bridge which has to be described as the Forth Road Bridge.

This bridge was built in 1890, significantly earlier than the road bridge, for the trains of its time. Now it sees a steady stream of InterCity 125 high speed trains, intermodal container trains, oil trains, heavy coal trains heading for the power stations of Fife and a wide mix of commuter and regional trains. OK, there are speed limits and there are weight limits - the former allowing passengrs to admire the stunning view - but still the bridge, over 100 years after its construction, continues to do the job it was designed to do under weights unimagined by its builders.