Gladesville Bridge is a heritage-listed concrete arch road bridge that carries Victoria Road over the Parramatta River, linking the Sydney suburbs of Drummoyne and Huntleys Point, in the local government areas of Canada Bay and Hunter's Hill respectively, in New South Wales, Australia. Despite its name, the bridge is not in Gladesville.
The Gladesville Bridge is a few kilometres upstream of the famous Sydney Harbour Bridge. When it was completed in 1964, Gladesville Bridge was the longest single span concrete arch ever constructed. Gladesville Bridge is the largest of a complex of three bridges, including Fig Tree Bridge and Tarban Creek Bridge, designed to carry traffic as part of the North Western Expressway. The bridge was the first phase of this freeway project that was to connect traffic from the via /Lane Cove, then through / to connect into the city. Due to community action the freeway project was abandoned by the Wran Government in 1977, leaving the Gladesville Bridge connecting the existing arterial roads.
The Gladesville Bridge was designed by Anthony Gee, G. Maunsell & Partners and Eugène Freyssinet and built from 1959 to 1964 by Reed & Mallik (Engineers, England) and Stuart Bros (Builders, Sydney). The property is owned by Transport for NSW. The bridge was added to the New South Wales State Heritage Register on 1 October 2014.
History
Europeans first settled in the Gladesville/Drummoyne area of Sydney soon after landfall at Sydney Cove. In the 1790s, Crown grants of lots were made available in the vicinity of Gladesville to encourage agricultural pursuits in the area. The future suburb of Gladesville remained isolated and rural until the 1850s when the earlier land grants were subdivided into large urban building blocks for the development of 'gentlemen's residences' for the wealthier colonists of NSW.|
| crosses = Parramatta River
| locale = Drummoyne and Huntleys Point, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia
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| design = Truss girder bridge with swing span
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| replaced_by = Gladesville Bridge
To provide better access to Sydney, a wharf was soon erected on the Parramatta River at Gladesville and a two-lane steel lattice truss girder bridge with swing span was built across the river between Drummoyne and Huntleys Point. Remnants of the sandstone abutments of the original bridge still exist on the river banks to the south-west of the present bridge. This bridge carried a tramline and road traffic but did not accommodate pedestrians.
The old Gladesville Bridge was constructed as part of a series of bridges built during the 1880s, which also saw the construction of the Fig Tree Bridge and the Iron Cove Bridge. It was the only crossing of the Parramatta River east of Parramatta at the time of construction, with punts and ferries (steamers) providing the main methods of crossing the river. The closest crossing to the bridge was the Bedlam Punt, which operated from 1829 through to 1881 between Punt Road in the present-day Gladesville and the Great North Road in present-day . This bridge was also constructed per agitation by the community on providing a tram service from Ryde to the city.
The 1881 Gladesville Bridge was about to the west of the modern bridge. This original bridge only carried one lane of traffic in each direction as well as a tramway. It featured a swing span on the southern end of the bridge that could be opened to permit sailing ships and steamers with high funnels to pass. 'Sixty miler' colliers from Newcastle would require the bridge to be opened to gain access to the Australian Gas Light Company (AGL) gasworks site at , (now redeveloped as ). The bridge stood on iron cylinders with a sandstone pier at each end of the bridge. The sandstone piers are all that remain today of the original bridge, with the northern pier adjacent to the Huntleys Point ferry wharf, and the southern in Howley Park in Drummoyne.
Current bridge
By the 1950s, due to a rapid growth in private car ownership and road freight transport in Sydney during the interwar and post World War 2 period, the traffic crossing the old Gladesville Bridge was becoming increasingly congested. With consistent interruptions and delays from the tramline and from shipping transportation along the Parramatta River, it was soon realised that a new bridge was required to alleviate the problem.
In the late 1950s, the Department of Main Roads (DMR) intended the replacement Gladesville Bridge to be a conventional steel truss of its own design. However, an alternative approach, prepared by English civil engineering firm G. Maunsell & Partners, was soon submitted by another English firm, Reed & Mallik Ltd which had teamed up with Sydney-based builders Stuart Brothers. The bridge was originally opened with six traffic lanes, but the extra-wide outer lanes enabled a later reconfiguration to take place. The bridge now has three northbound lanes and four southbound lanes, separated by a concrete median.
Design and construction
At the time when the bridge was planned, it was anticipated that extremely large vessels would need to pass underneath it in the years to come. This, as well as the topography of the site, explains why the bridge was designed with a high 61 metre (200 ft) clearance.
The construction of the new Gladesville Bridge was a noteworthy engineering achievement for its time and, being both daring and untried, its innovative design and construction set several new standards on the international stage. In many ways the construction echoed the Roman method of building arches using segmented units built over a temporary formwork. In Gladesville's case, these were hollow precast concrete blocks which were hoisted up from barges on the river, then moved down a railway on the top of the formwork into position. Every few blocks, special inflatable rubber gaskets were inserted. When all of the blocks in the arch (there are four parallel arches altogether, not seen in the picture) were in place, the gaskets were 'inflated' using synthetic hydraulic fluid, expanding the entire arch and lifting it away from the formwork to support its own weight. Once adjusted to the correct position, the gaskets were filled with liquid concrete, driving out the oil and setting to form a permanent solid arch. The formwork was then moved sideways and the next arch constructed in the same fashion. Once all four arches were erected, the deck was laid on top built from further precast concrete units. The arches bed into solid sandstone bedrock on either side of the river.
The bridge as originally tendered for this location was a rather conventional steel cantilever bridge, but one of the contractors tendered the alternative catenary arch design, recognising it was pushing the envelope of existing bridge-building knowledge. The contractor's designer was G Maunsell & Partners of London. Their alternative was accepted after submission to the famous bridge engineer Eugène Freyssinet, who approved the design with recommendations. The inflatable gasket method for example had been pioneered by Freyssinet on much earlier designs.
Gladesville Bridge was the first span concrete bridge in the world and had a substantial number of engineering and technical elements that made it a world-leading bridge design and construction achievement. It was also the first bridge, if not one of the first bridges, to utilise computer programming in its construction. As there was no suitable proprietary engineering software available at that time, the bridge designer (Anthony Gee of G. Maunsell & Partners) also wrote a suite of five computer programs for analysis and detailed design to guide its construction.
Gallery
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File:Sydney from Gladesville Bridge.jpg|The view of Sydney from the current Gladesville Bridge
File:Gladesville Bridge from Paramatta River in December 2014.jpg|The western side of the Gladesville Bridge
File:View of Parramatta River facing east from Gladesville Bridge.jpg|Daytime view of Parramatta River from Gladesville Bridge facing east
File:The Gladesville Bridge ... Sydney's lesser known bridge - panoramio.jpg|View of the Gladesville Bridge looking east
</gallery>
See also
- List of bridges in Sydney
- List of the largest arch bridges