Forth Bridge

Interesting facts

The Prince of Wales, later Edward VII, opened the bridge on 4 March 1890 by driving home a final rivet that was gold-plated and inscribed.

The man suspended between the chairs in the famous cantilever demonstration of 1887 was the Japanese engineer Kaichi Watanabe.

Research published in 2019 identified at least 78 men who died building the bridge; 38 died in falls, nine were crushed and nine drowned.

On 16 October 1939, twelve German Ju 88 bombers attacked Royal Navy ships near the bridge; sixteen sailors were killed and 44 wounded.

The bridge appears in Alfred Hitchcock's The 39 Steps (1935) and in its 1959 remake.

It has featured on a British one-pound coin in 2004 and on Scottish banknotes, including a 2015 polymer five-pound note with builder Sir William Arrol.

Its main spans of 1,700 feet held the world record until 1919, when the Quebec Bridge in Canada overtook them.

Before opening, the bridge was load-tested on 21 January 1890, and the first complete crossing was made on 24 February.

Why it is worth it

When the Tay Bridge blew down in 1879 with a train on it, work stopped on its designer's planned suspension bridge over the Firth of Forth. The engineers who replaced him, John Fowler and Benjamin Baker, set out to build something that could never be accused of flimsiness. The result, opened in March 1890, is the Forth Bridge: a railway viaduct 2.5 km long whose three great cantilever towers, each 110 metres high on granite piers, carry the double track 46 metres above high water. Its two main spans of about 520 metres were the longest in the world until 1919 and are still the second-longest of any cantilever bridge.

The principle is simple and was famously demonstrated with people: two men sit on chairs with arms outstretched holding sticks, a third sits on a plank suspended between them, and their weight is balanced by bricks at the outer ends. The bridge is the same idea in 55,000 tonnes of steel. It was the first major structure in Britain built of steel rather than wrought iron — unlike its exact contemporary, the Eiffel Tower — and some 6.5 million rivets hold it together. The tubes for the towers were bent and drilled in workshops on the hillside at South Queensferry.

At its peak about 4,600 men worked on the bridge. The engineers' own record gave 57 deaths; local historians have since connected at least 73 deaths with the construction and its aftermath, and a memorial committee set out to name them all. The bridge also produced an English idiom: painting the Forth Bridge, a task that never ends. In fact no endless repainting ever happened, and between 2002 and 2011 the whole structure was stripped to bare steel and given a new coating expected to last at least twenty years.

The bridge is still a working main line, owned by Network Rail and crossed by up to 200 trains a day. It was made a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2015, and in a 2016 vote it was chosen as Scotland's greatest man-made wonder. The best views are from the shore at South Queensferry, beside the Forth Road Bridge.

Getting there

The bridge crosses the Firth of Forth between South Queensferry and North Queensferry, about 9 km from Dunfermline and 9 miles (about 14 km) west of central Edinburgh. Edinburgh Airport (EDI) is about 5.5 km away. The simplest way to experience it is by train: services from Edinburgh to Fife and the north cross it, and there are stations at Dalmeny on the south side and North Queensferry on the north.

From the encyclopaedia

The Forth Bridge is a cantilever railway bridge across the Firth of Forth in the east of Scotland, 9 miles west of central Edinburgh. Completed in 1890, it is considered a symbol of Scotland, and is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. It was designed by English engineers Sir John Fowler and Sir Benjamin Baker. It is sometimes referred to as the Forth Rail Bridge, although this is not its official name.

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Forth Bridge

Interesting facts

Why it is worth it

Getting there

Plan your visit

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From the encyclopaedia