At 1 mile and 51 feet(1,623 metres) it is the longest and at 314 feet (96 metres) the CPR trestle in Lethbridge is the highest trestle bridge in the world. It serves the Canadian Pacific Railway's Crowsnest line as it passes over the Oldman River Valley.
Coordinates are for the east end of the bridge. A great vantage point is from the side road directly west from the information centre on First Avenue, just south of the east end of the bridge:
Photos old and new are taken from near there, on the south side of the bridge on the east side of the valley, looking west across it.
Built in 1909, the bridge took ten months to build and required 12,436 tons of steel, 328,000 rivets and 7,600 gallons of paint.
Lethbridge, Alberta Viaduct
Not only is it the world’s longest and highest railway trestle, but it may be the toughest, too.
There are no restrictions on the length or weight of the mile-long freight trains that roll across the Lethbridge Viaduct a dozen times a day, even though the bridge is preparing to celebrate its 100th birthday in September.
The High Level Crossing, as it is commonly known in Southern Alberta, is slightly more than a mile long at 5,331 feet and soars 314 feet above the Old Man River, which flows through a deep ravine on the west side of Lethbridge.
John Edward Schwitzer, assistant chief of engineering at Canadian Pacific Railway, was in charge of erecting what many newspapers of the day called “one of the wonders of the world.”
High Level Bridge is the principal icon of Lethbridge, a city of 85,500 about 222 kilometres southeast of Calgary. It was built to eliminate 22 wooden trestles and 37 curves, reduce the grade level by half and cut fives miles off the route between Lethbridge and Fort MacLeod on CP’s southern line, which follows the Crowsnest Pass through the Rockies.
Before the high trestle was built for $1.3 million, locomotives had to reduce their loads to wind their way down into and out of both the Old Man River and St. Mary River valleys.
The 12,400 tons of steel girders for the bridge were manufactured by Canada Bridge Company at its Windsor plant and shipped on 645 railway cars to the east bank of the Old Man River valley.
Construction started in August 1908 and the 100-man crew finished erecting steel by June ’09, using a custom-built railroad crane, called an “erection traveler,” with a 116-foot boom. After tracks started protruding from the east bank the erection traveler was able to carry steel girders out over the deep ravine.
Thirty-three rigid steel towers carry the rail bed across the ravine. Schwitzer designed the towers to not only support the weight of trains passing overhead, but also to resist the steady winds sweeping out of the Crowsnest Pass.
Just west of Lethbridge hundreds of 15-storey wind turbines have been erected on ridges to harness those strong winds funneling through Crowsnest Pass.
Renowned American engineer C.C. Sneider was hired as a consulting engineer on the Lethbridge Viaduct. Sneider was elected president of the American Society of Civil Engineers in 1905 and was one of the engineers hired to erect the Statue of Liberty in 1886.
He also headed up the team of engineers that investigated the 1907 collapse of the first Quebec Bridge, when 75 bridge builders were killed.
From the Daily Commercial News