The bridge was considerably damaged by the great cyclone on 20 March 1874. The assembling period was fraught with problems. Different parts of the bridge were constructed in England and shipped to Calcutta, where they were assembled. The Calcutta Port Trust was founded in 1870, and the Legislative department of the then Government of Bengal passed the Howrah Bridge Act in the year 1871 under the Bengal Act IX of 1871, empowering the lieutenant-governor to have the bridge constructed with Government capital under the aegis of the Port Commissioners.Įventually a contract was signed with Sir Bradford Leslie to construct a pontoon bridge. The plan was shelved in 1859–60, to be revived in 1868, when it was decided that a bridge should be constructed and a newly appointed trust vested to manage it. In view of the increasing traffic across the Hooghly river, a committee was appointed in 1855–56 to review alternatives for constructing a bridge across it. The impediment to shipping would be considerable.Ī good place for the bridge was at Pulta Ghat "about a dozen miles north of Calcutta" where a "bed of stiff clay existed at no great depth under the river bed".Ī suspended-girder bridge of five spans of 122 m and two spans 61 m would be ideal. The foundations for a bridge at Calcutta would be at a considerable depth and cost because of the depth of the mud there.
He reported on 19 March, with large-scale drawings and estimates, that:
He had recently established the company's rail terminus in Howrah. In 1862, the Government of Bengal asked George Turnbull, chief engineer of the East Indian Railway Company to study the feasibility of bridging the Hooghly River. The third-longest cantilever bridge at the time of its construction, the Howrah Bridge is currently the sixth-longest bridge of its type in the world. It carries a daily traffic of approximately 100,000 vehicles and possibly more than 150,000 pedestrians, easily making it the busiest cantilever bridge in the world. The other bridges are the Vidyasagar Setu (popularly called the Second Hooghly Bridge), the Vivekananda Setu and the relatively new Nivedita Setu. The bridge is one of four on the Hooghly River and is a famous symbol of Kolkata and West Bengal. It is still popularly known as the Howrah Bridge. On 14 June 1965, it was renamed Rabindra Setu after the great Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore, who was the first Indian and Asian Nobel laureate.
Commissioned in 1943, the bridge was originally named the New Howrah Bridge, because it replaced a pontoon bridge at the same location linking the cities of Howrah and Kolkata (Calcutta). The Howrah Bridge is a balanced cantilever bridge over the Hooghly River in West Bengal, India.
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