Original plans called for the bridge to have a 1°30″ curve, which would have allowed speeds of . However, the design was altered and the curve on the bridge was eliminated in favor of making it tangent (straight) with curved approaches—a 1°30″ curve on the New Jersey side and a 3°30″ curve on the Pennsylvania side. The latter curve—the sharpest on the cut-off, which otherwise did not have any curves sharper than 2°—required trains to slow to . Later, the
super-elevation of this curve was increased, bumping up the speed limit to . Construction of the bridge was described in a 1909 article by
Abraham Burton Cohen, then a draftsman for the
Delaware, Lackawanna and Western Railroad, who went on to design the
Tunkhannock Viaduct, an even larger structure on the railroad's
Clarks Summit–Hallstead Cut-Off. appearing in the distance, taken from the Pennsylvania side of the river, July 1923. The footings were excavated down to bedrock, which ranges from to below the surface. A total of of concrete and 627 tons of reinforcing steel were used to construct this bridge. At its completion, the viaduct was thought to be the largest reinforced concrete structure built with a continuous pour process. There is no known evidence to support the legend that several workers fell into the concrete during construction and could not be extracted because of the need to keep pouring. This legend has been attached to other large concrete structures, including
Hoover Dam. The bridge was completed on December 1, 1910, about a year before the cut-off opened, which allowed construction trains to haul building materials to work sites east of the bridge. ==Disuse and proposals for possible future use==