St. Lawrence Bridge Company

Corporate body

St. Lawrence Bridge Company

n.d.

The waters of the St. Lawrence River have long served Canada as a great artery of commerce, but after the coming of the railroad, the river also became a barrier to east-west transportation at the river's two principal Quebec ports. Montreal solved the problem in 1859 with the Victoria Bridge, leaving its downriver commercial rival, the city of Quebec, at a severe disadvantage. Quebec eagerly sought a bridge of its own. There were several proposals for great suspension or cantilever bridges, but nothing came of them until formation of the Quebec Bridge Company in 1887. By 1890 the company had contracted with the Phoenix Bridge Company of Pennyslvania to build a cantilever bridge with a main span of 1800 feet that would have eclipsed Scotland's Firth of Forth bridge as the longest cantilever span in the world. By Summer 1907 the structure was well advanced, with the cantilever arms projected out from both shores of the river, when a disastrous failure of the south arm plunged 76 workmen to their deaths. A Royal Commission attributed the failure to defective design and errors in judgment by the engineers. A year later the Canadian government appointed a board of engineers to try again, chief among them the noted American bridge designer Ralph Modjeski. Work began on the new bridge in 1909 and was nearing completion seven years later when disaster struck again. The 5000-ton center span was being lifted into place when a bearing failed, allowing the span to fall into the river. This time, 13 workers were killed. A year later a new span was successfully lifted into place, and in October 1917 the first train crossed the great bridge. The bridge has stood firmly astride the St. Lawrence ever since, helping to link the Maritime Provinces and eastern Quebec with the rest of Canada. The record its builders set in 1917 still stands, for the Quebec Bridge remains the longest railroad cantilever span ever built (overall length 987 metres, width 29 metres, height 103 metres). The Quebec Bridge was declared a historic monument in 1987, by the Canadian & American Society of Civil Engineers and a National Historic Site on January 24, 1996 by the Department of Canadian Heritage.

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