02/05/2024
On this day in history – 2 May 1859, the official opening of the Royal Albert Bridge, Saltash took place. The ceremony was performed by Prince Albert with an audience of thousands. There was a celebration ball in Plymouth in the evening. The Prince in his special train left Windsor at 6am and didn’t return until 12.50am the next day. Brunel himself wasn’t well enough to be there that day but, lying on a couch, was taken over the bridge by train later that month: he died less than four months later. This photograph shows the bridge, seen from the Saltash side of the river in the 19th century.
The 730 yard long bridge 180 feet above the River Tamar cost £225,000 to build. 1,150 suspension chain links used in the construction were made at Hayle in Cornwall: these had originally been intended for the Clifton Suspension Bridge in Bristol which temporarily ran out of funds in 1853. These links were bought by Brunel for the Cornwall Railway and he had more made at a foundry in Rotherhithe, London.
Divers had first inspected the bed of the River Tamar in 1847 before Brunel did a series of 175 trial borings into the river bed. A double-track bridge had been planned but it was reduced to single line on economy grounds. Work on the pontoons started in 1854 and the two main spans were floated into position during 1857 and 1858.
Brunel tested the structure with a 1,190 ton load spread over 455 feet of broad gauge track and found that the two main 455 feet spans bent downwards by about seven inches each. The test load was almost three times heavier than any train running at the time. The tubes for the upper sections of the bridge’s main spans measured 16 feet 9 inches wide by 12 feet 6 inches high and each span contained 1,260 tons of wrought iron and 1,290 tons of cast iron.
The 17 approach spans were re-girdered in 1928, and in 1938 an army of men took almost a year to repaint the bridge using ten tons of paint and 200 gallons of coal tar on an estimated 39,000 square yards of structure.
On 1 May 1959 to commemorate the centenary of the bridge’s opening, the structure was illuminated every night until 13 September with equipment provided by the General Electric Company. With the prospect of heavier freight loads, tests were conducted in 1966 to determine if trains of over 1,000 tons gross could be run. This resulted in work during 1969 to fit 24 new diagonal ties to each span. The timber decking was also renewed and new ’flexing’ paint was applied.
