Spanning the Columbia: The Great Northern's Engineering Triumph
A massive, gravity-defying cantilever bridge nears completion near Rock Island, marking a feat of railroad ingenuity.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
The longest span of the great cantilever bridge of the Great Northern railroad over the Columbia river at Rock Island is at last completed and the whole bridge will be ready for the running of trains about May 1. The work is one of the greatest feats of engineering skill in the history of railroad building. The Columbia river in this part of its course is between 300 and 1,000 yards wide and from 12 to 200 feet in depth at low water. After many surveys, the company selected a site a mile and a half above the station of Rock Island and nine miles below Wenatchee. The whole bridge is 916 feet long and is 120 feet above low water. The main span reaches 416 feet over the main channel and weighs 856 tons. It was built by the Edgemore Bridge Works of Wilmington, Delaware, under the superintendence of J. A. Sheedy. The construction required an ingenious plan: because of the depth, false work was impossible, so the side spans were built in an inverted position to act as levers, weighted with 400 tons of steel rails to balance the main span as it was projected over the abyss.
“The work from the two sides was joined by steel ties during the last few days so that the workmen and others who had the nerve crossed on foot.”
This bridge marked a transformative moment for Eastern Washington, physically binding the region to the Great Northern line. Today, the stretch of the Columbia near Wenatchee remains a critical artery for infrastructure, even as the scale of these early engineering marvels continues to shape the landscape.
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