Albert Bridge, Brisbane

Okay, so I'm here at the Albert Bridge, and it's pretty impressive. This railway bridge connects Indooroopilly and Chelmer, and you can see it's made of steel trusses. It was designed by Henry Charles Stanley and built back in 1894 to 1895. Apparently, it's named after Prince Albert, the Prince of Wales.

What's really interesting is that this isn't the first bridge here. The original one, also called Albert Bridge, was finished in 1876 and allowed the railway to finally reach Brisbane from Ipswich. Before that, the river was a huge obstacle, and people relied on river boats. That first bridge was crucial for moving goods, but sadly, it was destroyed in the massive 1893 flood. After that, they had to use ferries, which even led to a terrible disaster in 1896 where over 40 people died when the ferry Pearl capsized.

This current bridge was built to replace the lost one. Stanley, who was Queensland's Chief Engineer of Railways, designed it with these two long spans and just one central pier. He did that specifically to minimize obstruction to floodwaters, learning from what happened to the first bridge. They even included cool innovations like protection against derailment and strong wind gusts, and features allowing for expansion in different temperatures.

The construction itself was a huge undertaking. John McCormick & Son got the contract in 1893 for over £66,000. They even had to build a workshop right here at Indooroopilly for the work. A Scottish coal strike delayed delivery of the steel for eight months, and just removing the bedrock for the central pier took four months! At one point, 240 people were working on site. This was actually the largest bridge in Australia made locally when it was finished in 1895.

The central pier was the toughest part – its foundation caisson weighed about 230 long tons and went 81 feet below high water mark, sunk into rock. They could dredge the sand and gravel, but divers had to manually extract the rock. They even floated the northern truss into position using a barque and winches, which sounds like quite a spectacle.

For a while, this bridge even had a footway for pedestrians, until the Walter Taylor Bridge was built in 1937. It's still one of Australia’s largest truss bridges, and it was integral to connecting Brisbane with Ipswich and the wider region. Today, it mostly handles passenger traffic, and there's another railway bridge next to it that was built in 1957. Pretty cool history for a bridge!