North Bridge

“ In the Tower Bridge there are two of such huge “flaps” or leaves, each about 100 feet long, one rising and falling from each pier and meeting in the centre. Large bascule bridges are usually constructed in this manner, and there is an excellent specimen over the Ouse, for the passage of the North-Eastern railway; one man at each half of the bridge can raise it in less than two minutes. Another fine bascule may be seen at Copenhagen.
The bascules are raised and lowered by chains, which, in the case of the Tower Bridge, are worked by superb hydraulic power from the massive pier towers. ”

“ On March 4, 1890, during a violent gale which blew from the south west with a pressure of 20 lb. per square foot, the Prince of Wales closed the last rivet in the north central girder, and from the south port of the south cantilever end pier declared the bridge open. ”

“ With respect to the Bridge itself, it is filled with buildings, in which the Traitors’ Gate with the heads, the Nonesuch House, and the Chapel of St. Thomas, are particularly visible; whilst above the houses, at the North end, is seen the top of ‘The Water Worke.’ From the windows of several of the houses, buckets are being let down by long ropes into the water, which is seen rushing through the arches with great impetuosity, although there is no fall. ”

“ By Beast Market Hill, past the castle and over the bridge, one leaves Newark for the north. Level crossings of the railways now and again bedevil the way, which is flat so far as the eye can reach—and much farther, and the meadows on either side are intersected by runlets and marshes, the road carried over them by a succession of red-brick bridges. At a distance of one and a half miles, the true Trent is crossed by a wooden bridge, and South Muskham reached, where the level-crossing gates take the place of the old turnpike. ”

“ Thirty years later, when a new bridge of 1600 feet was wanted to cross another part of the East River at New York, the same lines of construction were followed, and they will be followed in the 2700-foot span, designed to cross the North River some time in the present century.428 The only radical advance is the use of a better steel than could be had in earlier days.
Steel-arched bridges are now scientifically designed. Such are the new Niagara Bridge, of 840-foot span, and the Alexandra Bridge at Paris. ”

“ This bridge gives access to and from the black town by the ascent of the rising ground, and is laid pointing to the N. w. the ascent begins almost as soon as you have crossed the bridge, and the road to the top continues about 300 yards in that direction, when it turns into a long street of Indian houses, which runs nearly north and south, and is crossed by several others on either hand. ”

“ In 1873 the Forth Bridge Company was formed for the purpose of carrying out the design by Sir Thomas Bouch of a suspension bridge with two large spans of 1600 ft. each. The capital was raised by the four principal railway companies interested in the East Coast traffic—namely, the Great Northern, the North-Eastern, the Midland, and the North-British, and the companies came to an understanding among themselves that they would between them send so much traffic across the bridge as would suffice to pay a dividend of 6 per cent. ”

“ There seems, however, to have been but little satisfaction given by the extensive alterations and improvements of this edifice; for, at the very same Court, a petition for relief was presented from the Watermen’s Company, stating that the navigation through the Great Arch of London Bridge was very dangerous, from the two adjoining Arches on the North side being stopped up; and vessels being caught in the eddy it occasioned, received considerable damage before they could escape, which had sometimes occasioned the loss of life. ”

“ After thanking our obliging informant, we descended the chains on the Anglesea side, and proceeded to the water’s edge, to look at the archways formed under the road between the main pier and the land. These, which look so small in the printed views of the bridge, we found to be as broad and as lofty as the aisles of Cathedrals; being sixty-five feet in height, to the spring of the arches, and the span of each arch being fifty-two feet. ”

“ To enable the contractors to make an early start with the permanent work, that is, the building of the masonry piers, it was necessary that the positions of these should be fixed without delay. A base line about 4000 ft. in length was laid down along the high ground on the south shore, starting from a point in the centre line of the bridge, passing along the North British Railway for some distance and terminating opposite the east breakwater at Port Edgar. Along the breakwater a timber gangway was erected, and near the far end of it, at a distance of about 3000 ft. ”

“ The dedication states, however, that Norden had ‘described it in the time of Queene Elizabeth, but that the plate had bene neare these 20 yeares imbezeled and detained by a person till of late vnknowne.’ The view of the Bridge is taken from the Eastern side, and the edifice is represented horizontally, from South to North; though it is singularly enough stated to be from East to West: it measures 201⁄2 inches by 105⁄8, and is engraved in a border surmounted by the arms and supporters of James I., having its name written upon a scroll. At each end of the print is a naked [364] boy flying ”

“ We know not, Mr. Barbican, at what exact period London Bridge was first occupied by shops, but in the Survey of Bridge-lands which I have already repeated to you, it appears very probable that some of the shops in the Bridge Street were actually erected on the Bridge. Houses with distinguishing [374] signs, however, must have been built upon this edifice at a very early period; for the first notice of one, which I can now recollect, is in the fire which brake out at the Pannier, at the North end of the Bridge in 1504 ”

“ This scheme also proved abortive, and for forty years more the travelling public put up with what they could get, but at last in 1860 the North British Railway fixed upon a site about six miles to the west of South Queensferry as suitable for the construction of a railway bridge. The bridge was to have consisted of a number of large spans of 500 ft. each in the centre, with approaches in shorter spans at either end. ”

“ Now whether those who made the bridge did really get in the foundations of the piers on woolsacks thrown into the sand until they touched bottom (something after the manner in which Stephenson floated his railway across Chat Moss on faggots) ; or whether the story is merely a perversion of Bideford’s old and prosperous wool-trade having been taxed for the work—and thus, in a sense, the bridge being “built on woolsacks”—there are no means of saying.
In 1810, the bridge was found—like Barnstaple bridge, a few years earlier—too narrow for increasing181 traffic. ”

“ From the spot on which we stood we observed innumerable workmen completing the road to the bridge, and preparing the iron net-work which is to form the sides of the bridge, as soon as the carriage-ways are placed along the perpendicular suspenders from the chains. ”

“ The supporting chains, which were brought from old Hungerford Bridge, are thrown over lofty turrets, resting in one case on a projecting bastion of rock, and in the other on a solid pier of masonry. These slender suspenders carry a roadway and two footpaths across a span of 700 feet. The bridge stands 245 feet above high-water level, and its altitude seems to furnish an irresistible temptation to people of a suicidal tendency. ”

“ Only rarely does one see the hut of rough logs and clay that denotes the settler, only occasionally is there a station, or a mill or a logging camp in this womb of loneliness. Only occasionally does one cross one of those lengthy and rakish spider bridges that give a hint of man and his works.
On a long bridge, over the Montreal river, we made the most of man and his works. It is a lengthy, curving bridge, built giddily on stilts above the boulder-strewn bed of a wicked stream. We were admiring it as a desperate work of engineering, when the train stopped with a disconcerting bump. ”

“ The Grand Trunk struck into the Prairie Provinces with depots at Fort William, Port Arthur, and many other strategic centres. Mr. Hays had a great idea of the value of bridges. One of his conceptions was a single-span double-track bridge crossing the Niagara Gorge. This was opened in 1897, replacing the suspension bridge opened in 1853. The Gorge Bridge is a splendid piece of engineering, the span of the arch being 550 feet and the width of the railway flooring 32 feet, the lines being 245 feet above water. ”

“ All who have travelled through the delicious scenery of North Devon must needs know the little white town of Bideford which slopes upwards from its broad tide-river paved with yellow sands, and many-arched old bridge where salmon wait for Autumn floods, toward the pleasant upland on the west. ”

“ Paul's was one of the largest churches in Europe: its length was at least 600 feet; the spire reached the height of 460 feet. The church stood in a large walled enclosure, still kept partly open, though the wall has long since been pulled down and there have been encroachments on the north side.{83}
LONDON BEFORE THE SPIRE OF ST. PAUL'S WAS BURNED: SHOWING ALSO THE BRIDGE, THE TOWER, SHIPPING, ETC.
The church in the fourteenth century was not regarded only as a place for public worship. Masses and services of all kinds were going on all day long: ”

“ The last-named bridge is a remarkably elegant structure, thrown over the Spey at a point where the river, rushing obliquely against the lofty rock of Craig-Ellachie,* [11] has formed for itself a deep channel not exceeding fifty yards in breadth. Only a few years before, there had not been any provision for crossing this river at its lower parts except the very dangerous ferry at Fochabers. The Duke of Gordon had, however, erected a suspension bridge at that town, and the inconvenience was in a great measure removed. ”

“ It is no use my reminding you that no railroad goes to the old home place. It isn't there any more, even in outward seeming. Cummins's woods, where you had your robbers' cave, is all cleared off and cut up into building lots. The cool and echoing covered bridge, plastered with notices of dead and forgotten Strawberry Festivals and Public Vendues, has long ago been torn down to be replaced by a smart, red iron bridge. The Volunteer Firemen's Engine-house, whose brick wall used to flutter with the gay rags of circus-bills, is gone as if it never were at all. ”

“ Myself, I hate such a strumpet of a bridge as the Hoogesluis at Amsterdam, with her ornate spandrils, and her embossed masonry, and her balustraded parapet surmounted by a row of obelisks around which lamps are bracketed. Also I hate such a suspension bridge as the one at Conway Castle, where the metal rods that support the roadway pass through a brace of turrets on each of the embattled gateways. The effect is not only comic but ludicrous. No engineer with any sense would have put a metal viaduct within a few yards of Conway Castle. ”

“ As a rule, these road-bridges are simple and inexpensive in character, except in towns, or in cases where the line crosses the roads very obliquely, or where the road is situated at the top of a deep cutting, or bottom of a high embankment. Away from towns and out in the open country, permission is generally obtained to divert the roads to a moderate extent, so as to obtain a more favourable angle and height for the bridge; but in towns, where the roads become streets, sometimes of great width, with houses and shops on each side, little or no diversion can be allowed. ”

“ NORTHFIELD is a thriving, pretty, little village, situated pleasantly upon both banks of the Cannon river just thirty-nine miles from St. Paul, in Rice county, on the St. Paul and Milwaukee railroad. A neat iron bridge unites the northwest and the southeast sides of the town, and just above the bridge is one of the finest mill races in the State, the water in its incessant flow roaring like the ocean and appearing like a minature Niagara. ”

“ These were approaches to the big covered bridge spanning the main channel of the Madawaska River, and when swelled by the spring thaws and rains, the two flanking channels divided at the foundations of the house, and rustled away through the narrow paths of the small bridges to the rapids. You could stand at any window in the House and watch the ugly, rushing current, gorged with logs, come battering at the wall, jostle between the piers, and race on to the rocks and the dam and the slide beyond. ”

“ Beyond the towers workmen in great numbers deepened a fosse, heaped ramparts, strengthened walls, and in the earth over which Montmaure must advance planted sharpened stakes and all gins and snares that the inventive mind might devise. To hold this bridge was of an importance!—South and east stretched the yet unharried lands and the roads by which must come in food for the town, the roads by which it might keep in touch with the world without, the roads by which might travel succour! ”

“ Then, of course, there are sky-tickling metal bridges, and these spindle-shanked devotees of peace are popular also in Canada. All this work is nothing but industrial engineering, like the mighty bridges at New York, though these do try to look somewhat architectural. One specimen, indeed, a vast structure called the New Manhattan Bridge, has marvellously long suspension cables which do not go through a tower or gateway; they actually pass over their supports in a logical manner. ”