THE opinions expressed in the following paper are based upon experience gained over a considerable period, and the author wishes to make clear at the outset that they are his opinions only and are not to be taken as those of any company with whom he might be connected. It must be understood that in a short description of this nature it is impossible to describe in detail the Contracts carried out under the author’s supervision, but an endeavour has been made to give some particulars of difficulties met with on the various jobs in question, and of any lessons learned. F.S. Snow
1. Introduction. VARIOUS methods of solving continuous beam problems have been published, but all those known to the authors involve the drawing of complete bending moment diagrams for each position of the load. From these diagrams the influence quantities can be obtained by measurement and calculation. In the following paper, a method of drawing the influence lines directly is presented. The case of a three-span beam has been taken, as this is very common in practice, but the method can easily be extended to more complicated cases. Some of the expressions appear a little cumbersome when symbols are used for the span lengths, but for actual numerical cases they are very simple, as will be seen by the example in Section (3). R.J. Cornish
Mr. Shelley asked the meeting to accept his published paper as read, and proceeded to give his replies to a number of questions which had been addressed to him in writing in response to the invitation contained in the footnote on page 429 of the November issue of The Structural Engineer.