The Lansdowne Bridge over the Indus without Pillars at Sukkur | Sindh

Описание: The Lansdowne Bridge over the Indus at Sukkur was one of the great engineering feats in the 19th century. The longest cantilever bridge ever built, it had to support the load of heavy steam locomotives. The bridge was inaugurated on March 25, 1889. The Ayub Bridge was built immediately adjacent to the bridge in 1962, to separate the road and Railway traffic. Hence the photographs of the Landsdown Bridge usually also show the Ayub Bridge.
It was designed by Sir Alexander Meadows Rendel; he designed the Lansdowne Bridge Rohri at Sukkur over the Indus River, which when it was completed in 1889 was the largest cantilever bridge in the world. The girder work, weighing a massive 3,300 tons, was manufactured in London by the firm of Westwood, Baillie and erected by F.E. Robertson, and Hecquet.[1] Upon completion, the bridge allowed for easier rail access between Sindh and Balochistan.
Indus was bridged at Attock in 1887 and that allowed Railways in India to run from the westernmost post of Khyber Pass to the eastern city of Calcutta.
India's rail link to the port of Karachi was however, still broken at the Indus flowing between the towns of Rohri and Sukkur. Indus was not bridged between Kotri and Hyderabad either therefore trains ran on Karachi-Jamshoro-Larkana-Sukkur route as early as 1879 and then they were ferried across to Rohri and vice versa on a river ferry.

At Sukkur the river Indus flows through a gap in a range of low limestone hills and gets divided into two channels (Sukkur and Rohri channels) by an island called Bukkur. The Bukkur Island thus provides the best spot for a river crossing. Bridging the channel between Bukkur and Rohri was not so easy. The river bed here is not rocky but silty which made it difficult to build a bridge pier. Therefore, bridge designs were put forward to build a bridge without a pillar. One such design was for an arched bridge but it was not considered in the 1870s. Later on in 1962, the river was bridged using a very similar design that came to be known as the Ayub arch.
The Indus Valley State Railway had reached Sukkur in 1879 and the steam ferry that transported eight wagons at a time across the Indus between Rohri and Sukkur was found to be cumbersome and time-consuming. The ferry link became redundant when Lord Reay, Governor of Bombay, deputising for Lord Lansdowne the viceroy, inaugurated the Bridge on March 25, 1889. As summer comes early to Sukkur and the heavy European-style uniforms of the time would have been uncomfortable, the opening ceremony took place early in the morning. At the ceremony, Lord Reay unlocked a highly ornamental padlock (designed by J.L. Kipling, CIE, Principal of the Mayo School of Art in Lahore and father of Joseph Rudyard, the famous poet and author) which held shut the cumbersome iron gates guarding entry to the bridge. The gathered dignitaries then walked across the bridge and adjourned to breakfast followed by toasts under a shamiana (Berridge 1967:128). The bridge provided the railway link between Lahore, in the heart of the granary of British India, and the port of Karachi on the Arabian Sea.

When the great steel Ayub arch was constructed (1960–1962), railway traffic was shifted there. About a hundred feet apart, the two bridges seem like one from a distance. The Ayub arch became the world's third longest railway arch span and the first bridge in the world to have "the railway desk slung on coiled wire rope suspenders." The consulting engineer was David B. Steinman[4] of New York, proponent of 'vocational aesthetics'. It cost about two crore rupees and the foundation stone was laid on December 9, 1960. It was opened by President Muhammad Ayub Khan on May 6, 1962.

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