Naerbro Crossing

The existing scheme was eleven floodlights on the abutments, aimed roughly at the trusses and mostly missing them. Half the output landed on the water and the harbour pilots had been complaining for years about veiling glare on the approach. Our brief from the port was simple and unusually strict: relight the structure, and put nothing in the eye of a helmsman sitting four metres above the waterline. That single constraint set the whole geometry of the scheme.

We moved every luminaire onto the structure itself and lit outward and upward into the trusses rather than inward from the banks. Each fitting carries an external snoot and an internal honeycomb louvre, and the mounting angles were set so that no direct component crosses the horizontal plane at deck level. Because the steel is painted a cool grey, 3000K read as dead and slightly blue against it, so we specified 2700K at CRI 90, which gave the paint back some warmth without turning it yellow.

Attachment was the hard part. The bridge is protected, so nothing could be drilled into the primary steel. We developed a clamped stainless bracket that grips existing rivet plates and takes its load in friction, signed off by the structural engineer after a pull test on a spare section in the yard. The scheme was mocked up over three nights from a moored barge, reviewed by the pilots themselves, and now dims to forty percent after 23:00 on an astronomical clock.