Only ONE Bailey.

On the Old Southern Main Road, Valsayn, straddling the Caroni, three bridges have been built over the course of time:

• The first, a steel structure, around the early 1870s, to accommodate wheeled traffic, of the animal-drawn type, for, back then, there weren't any motorcars in Trinidad. Back then, also, a country named Trinidad and Tobago did not exist! It was designed and built to last forever. Until the second bridge was built, the Silver Bridge, as, because of the hue in which it was painted, it was popularly known, provided the only means for vehicles to cross the mighty Caroni at that point, via a single lane. My forbears and a number of other ancient ones have always insisted that this was the first bridge built over the Caroni, at any point, for such a purpose.
  
• The second, also a steel structure, in 1996, was erected to provide short to long term additional passageway for wheeled traffic. It, too, was a steel structure and served its purpose. Nine moths after it was decommissioned, it went crashing into the river below whilst being dismantled by the competent authority: the Ministry of Works and Transport.
• The third bridge was commissioned in November 2007. Like its predecessors, this one was also made of steel, but, unlike them, was designed and built to accommodate two lanes of wheeled traffic. Its installers announced it would hold up for one hundred years.

All three bridges were of the truss design. However, only one, the second, the one that, literally, went down, was a Bailey bridge. Bailey bridges were invented by a British Civil Service engineer named Donald Bailey, during World War Two, an event which ran from 1939 to 1945. Bailey bridges did not, therefore, exist in the nineteenth century. And, the newest bridge, the only one now in use, is a Mabey bridge, which, though its concept derives from the Bailey bridge, can, by no stretch of the imagination, be called a Bailey bridge.

The Trinidad Newsday needs to check itself, lest it continues to put forth that there was more than one Bailey, when the truth is that there was only one, the one that had to be bailed out after a bungled breakdown job.

ADDENDUM: I lend support to Gayanand Sitram's call for the original bridge to be declared a historical site and, thus, be left intact. I so do mainly because The Silver Bridge harks back to an idyllic time when it, like Trinidad, stood alone.

The Silver Bridge, after it was painted orange.