Attock Bridge
Coordinates: 33 ° 52 ′ 21 ″ N , 72 ° 14 ′ 13 ″ E
| Attock Bridge | ||
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| use | Railway u. footbridge | |
| Crossing of | Indus | |
| place | Attock Khurd, Punjab , Pakistan | |
| construction | Truss bridge | |
| Number of openings | eight | |
| Longest span | 94 m | |
| start of building | 1880 | |
| completion | 1883/1929 | |
| planner | Guildford L. Molesworth et al. a. | |
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The Attock Bridge or Attock Bridge is a railway bridge over the Indus near the Pakistani towns of Attock Kurd in Punjab Province and Khairabad Kund in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Province .
It was built by the British in what was then British India between 1880 and 1883 to extend the Calcutta - Delhi - Rawalpindi railway to Peshawar . It was the first and remained the only bridge over the Indus until the Lansdowne Bridge , which stands about 755 km downstream as the crow flies , was opened in 1889 . Today it is part of the Karachi - Lahore - Rawalpindi - Peschawar route.
history
prehistory
The bridge stands around 2 km below the mouth of the Kabul in the Indus and the Attock Fort opposite , which Mughal Emperor Akbar I had built in the 16th century to cross the river between Kabul in Afghanistan and Calcutta in the later Grand Trunk Road Guarding Eastern India . Alexander the Great had used the transition and for the British it was also of particular importance in the context of the Great Game and the Anglo-Afghan wars .
The British initially made do with ship bridges , but they had to be dismantled again and again due to the periodically strong swelling of the current. From a military point of view, a permanent river crossing seemed extremely important. The plans submitted in 1853 for two different chain bridges were not pursued, however, because chain and suspension bridges were susceptible to enemy fire and were not regarded as sufficiently stable for rail traffic. In 1859 Colonel A. Robertson proposed a tunnel , construction of which began in 1860. Due to delays in the delivery of important machines, difficult to control problems with ingress of water and the associated cost increases, tunneling was finally abandoned in 1862, although only 79 m (258 ft ) were missing before the breakthrough.
Truss Bridge (1883)
After urging the military, a design by Guildford L. Molesworth , the then Consulting Engineer to the Government of India and the structural design drawn up by Francis O'Callaghan was accepted and the London company Westwood, Baillie was commissioned with the execution.
A place below the traditional river crossing was chosen as the construction site, where the river was only around 180 m wide at low tide and had a rock island in the middle, which could serve as a base for a central pillar, so that all other piers on the bank and on the side slopes could be built. On the other hand, one had to assume a rise in the water level of 30 m (100 ft). From 1880 to 1883 a 457 m (1500 ft) long bridge was built high above the river, the entrances of which were protected by castle gates over the first 15 m of the tracks. The valley was crossed by five wrought iron lattice girders with spans of 78 m (257 ft) + 78 m + 94 m (308 ft) + 94 m + 78 m, which were supported by four also wrought iron scaffolding pillars. The parallel-chorded trusses were 8 m (26 ft) high; the girders for the railroad track were arranged on the upper belts, while cross connections between the lower belts carried the roadway for road traffic.
A few years later, brick pillars were erected in front of the scaffolding pillars on the rocky island and on the bank to protect them from trees and other heavy objects that were carried along by the strong currents during floods.
Truss bridge (1929)
In the 40 years since Attock Bridge was built, locomotives and trains have gotten heavier and faster. In 1921 the result was that the bridge had suffered so much from the loads that it was necessary to renew the superstructure. During the construction, undermining was also found on the rock island. Therefore the island was reinforced with concrete. The scaffolding pillars were converted into concrete pillars, including the older protective pillars, so that the bridge now stands on unusually wide pillars. Above the two large main openings, the old girders were replaced with steel fish-belly girders while traffic was running . The girders above the side openings were supported by new concrete pillars in the middle of the side openings, so that a total of two stream openings and six side openings resulted. On August 30, 1929 this renovation work was finished.
In 1979 the first of the two concrete bridges for the N-5 national road was opened above Attock Fort, which took over road traffic. Since then, the Attock Bridge has only served as a railway bridge, the lower deck of which was left to local pedestrians. It has been often referred to as the Old Attock Bridge since then .
Web links
- The Attock Bridge . Photo and sketch of the original bridge in: Scientific American Supplement No. 470, New York, January 3, 1885. To The Project Gutenberg
- Old Attock Bridge Historical photos (from 1929) with brief descriptions on the website of the IRFCA - Indian Railways Fan Club
- Owais Mughal: Railway Bridge on Indus at Attock. Article dated August 31, 2011 on Federal-B-Area , wordpress.com
Individual evidence
- ↑ Attock Kurd = Little Attock is the historical place at the foot of the Attock Fortress on the banks of the Indus. After the construction of the railway, the British founded a town of Campbellpur about 20 km southwest of it . After Pakistan's independence in 1947, the name Campbellpur was changed to Attock (cf. Pervaiz Munir Alvi: When Kabul comes to Attock . Article of January 24, 2007 on All Things Pakistan. )
- ↑ Attock . In: Der Große Brockhaus, 15th edition, Leipzig 1929
- ^ R. Leech: Description of the Passage of the Indus at Attock, by a Bridge of Boats. In: Sir Alexander Burnes, Robert Leech, Perceval Barton Lord, John Wood (Eds.): Reports and Papers, Political, Geographical, & Commercial Submitted to the Government. GH Huttmann, Bengal Military Orphan Press, Calcutta 1839, pp. 15-17. ( Digitized on Google Books)
- ↑ The first tunnel under a river, the Thames Tunnel between the London districts of Rotherhithe and Wapping , was completed in 1843.
- ^ A b c d Owais Mughal: Railway Bridge on Indus at Attock. Article dated August 31, 2011 on Federal-B-Area , wordpress.com
- ↑ Dynamite as a manageable explosive was not yet available at that time.
- ^ Alaric Robertson: The Indus Tunnel. In: JG Medley (Ed.): Professional Papers on Indian Engineering . Volume 2. Thomason College Press, Roorkee 1865, pp. 34–56 ( digitized on Google Books)
- ↑ Guildford L. Molesworth, CE In: Indian Engineering , October 1, 1887, p. 222. Digitized at archive.org.