Building the Hawkesbury Railway Bridge: Finding Lost Photos

When the Hawkesbury River Railway Bridge was completed in May 1889 it was the last link in a continuous railway network connecting areas north of Brisbane through Sydney and Melbourne to Adelaide and beyond.

It was a necessary pre-requisite for federation and Henry Parkes said as much at the opening. The reason that a structure, almost within the suburbs of Sydney, was the last to be built, on a railway which stretched for thousands of miles, was the immense engineering difficulty of the site. At the time of opening it was an internationally acclaimed wonder, having the deepest foundations of any bridge in the world.

The Union Railway Company of New York was awarded the contract to construct the bridge . The railways engineer-in-chief, John Whitton, who designed and built the railway, was not invited to design the bridge due to fallout from an enquiry into railway bridges. However, subcontractors were also involved in the actual construction work. The piers consisted of concrete below water with sandstone masonry above. The spans were assembled on Dangar Island and floated 1,500 metres (4,921 ft) or so across to the bridge site on barges.

The American contractors, Sam Ryland and Edwin Morseey took a scrap book and photo albums of their work home at the end of the job. 125 years later Bill Phippen tracked the albums down in Kansas City and Washington ,enabling a coalition of Sydney groups repatriated high resolution scans of the images and these inspired a book about the whole saga.

Railways enthusiast Bill Phippen will talk about the first bridge and the men who built it, and is lavishly illustrated with the Library of Congress images and other records.

In 2019 the bridge was recognised by Engineers Australia with the Colin Crisp Award for documentation of engineering heritage