High Level Bridge - Lethbridge, AB
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T0SHEA
N 49° 41.895 W 112° 51.111
12U E 366458 N 5506727
The High Level Bridge in Lethbridge is pretty much the king of railroad bridges.
Waymark Code: WMG0T5
Location: Alberta, Canada
Date Posted: 12/29/2012
Views: 7
Though outsiders often call this the "Lethbridge Viaduct", it is known locally as the High Level Bridge.
Viewed from space, this bridge is so large that it seems almost surreal. It seems totally out of scale with its surroundings - as though a child had taken a black pen and drew a rough bridge on the satellite picture and got it too big.
At 1 mile and 47 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:
N 49 41.843, W 112 51.142
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.
From the Daily Commercial Times (2009):
"John Edward Schwitzer, assistant chief of engineering at Canadian Pacific Railway, was in charge of erecting what many newspapers of the day(1909) 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.
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."
Visit Instructions:
Please provide another photo of the location. You don't have to be in there shot, but you can. The photo requirement is to discourage any armchair visiting.