Background During 1849, the
High Level Bridge, an elaborate twin-deck railway and road bridge built near the centre of
Newcastle upon Tyne to allow traffic to cross the
River Tyne, was officially opened by
Queen Victoria. Once the bridge was completed, trains could reach the recently built
Newcastle railway station. However, this arrangement was not ideal in practice as, in order to depart the station back across the High Level Bridge, trains had to reverse out of the station, a relatively tedious process. During the following 50 years, Britain's railway network and the number of passengers had expanded greatly. In its original proposed form, the new bridge followed a functional design developed by Charles Augustus Harrison, chief engineer of the NER. Harrison was the nephew of Thomas Elliot Harrison who, together with the pioneering railway engineer
Robert Stephenson, had previously produced plans for the existing High Level Bridge. The early design of the bridge called for the river to be crossed by two spans, supported by girder lattices, that would join up with several land approach arches; however, it had to be redesigned when the presence of abandoned coal workings were discovered at both ends of the intended bridge. The revised design remained a lattice girder bridge that carried four railway tracks, but featured a total of four spans over the River Tyne. These spans were supported by five
sandstone piers, which were decorated with pairs of cutaway arches, three of which are in the river itself. The northern approach featured a total of ten arches, which were used to house
workshops.
Construction On 13 February 1902, the contract for the bridge's construction was awarded to the
Darlington-based
Cleveland Bridge & Engineering Company; the programme was internally financed entirely by the NER. Excluding land purchases, it cost roughly £500,000 to construct, which has been estimated as being around £55 million in 2016 prices. On 29 July 1902, work on digging out the foundations for the structure commenced at the Newcastle end. The foundations under the three large river piers were laid by
divers working in
caissons (large, watertight chambers) underwater in
compressed air. This was known to be dangerous work even for the time; as such, no one under the age of 40 could be employed in this capacity and each man spent just four hours per shift in the caissons. Nevertheless, one man is recorded as having died, and another as having become seriously ill, that had been attributed to the effects of working in the compressed air conditions. Other workers became ill as a result of breathing in
sulphuretted
hydrogen, which seeped from the coal seams that the foundations were dug into. Rock was excavated from inside the caissons by blasting; the workers took refuge in an air-locked chamber in the access shaft while charges were being detonated. Once excavation work was finished, the caissons were filled with roughly 28,450 tonnes of concrete and piers constructed on top of them. Each pier, composed of
sandstone and
granite masonry, was built in a triple-shaft arrangement, being for the side-shafts and for the central shaft. Once the piers were finished, the spans were assembled in situ on
timber trestles. Those spans that were above the river were erected one at a time; during this process, half of the river's width would be closed to traffic for safety reasons. The bridge deck consists of steel lattice girders of the double Warren truss type, being deep overall at spacing. The deck itself is wide, while the total weight of the steel work is estimated to be around 5,820 tonnes. Perhaps one of the more notable facilities used in the construction of the bridge was an elevated
cableway which ran across the river. At the time, it was the largest cableway in the world, having a length of and being suspended above the Tyne at high water. A diameter steel cable was used to convey in excess of 23,000 tonnes of material. Following the completion of the bridge, the cableway was dismantled and the cable was transported to the
Swan Hunter and
Wigham Richardson shipyard in
Wallsend, where it was reused in the launch of the
ocean liner RMS Mauretania. Although the structure was not even fully completed, on 10 July 1906, the bridge was officially opened by
King Edward VII from a temporary platform at the
Gateshead end of the bridge). It was decided to name the structure after the reigning monarch, hence its name of the King Edward VII Bridge. According to the
Evening Chronicle, the bridge was the first to carry four main tracks, albeit the spaces between the tracks have occasionally proved to be too narrow for some modern, high-speed trains. On 27 September 1906, the effectiveness of the structure was demonstrated via the running of ten locomotives, weighing around 100 tons each, coupled together in two sets of five, over the bridge at a leisurely speed of . These locomotives were intentionally running side-by-side in order to exert the maximum possible strain upon each of the bridge's girders.
Operating life On 1 October 1906, the King Edward VII Bridge was opened to general traffic. Shortly thereafter, those trains using the
East Coast Main Line route switched to accessing Newcastle Station via the new crossing, while trains bound for
Sunderland and
Middlesbrough continued to use the
High Level Bridge. During March 1907, a freight line to
Dunston was opened to the east of the main line. During 1908, Harrison himself reportedly commented of the bridge that "... there was nothing very striking in the design of the bridge except that it was rather larger in span and width and greater in height above the river than most bridges that had been erected in the last few years". He did, however, think that the caissons of the structure were the largest that had been sunk since those used for the
Forth Bridge. During 1959, the locomotive shed at Greenesfield, Gateshead was closed; this closure allowed for the simplification of the track layout across the bridge; most notable among this work was the reduction from four lines to three across the south-western approach to the bridge. Between 1976 and 1991,
British Rail electrified most of the East Coast Main Line. As part of this programme, the bridge was equipped with overhead wiring gantries. In 1994, the bridge was
Grade II listed. ==References==