BRUNEL’S BRIDGES

Taranaki Daily News, 6 October 1934, Page 21 (Supplement)

BRUNEL’S BRIDGES

LAST ONE DISAPPEARS. ITS GREAT ACHIEVEMENT. The last of the 80 timber viaducts designed by Isambard Brunel for the Great Western Railway in Britain is being replaced by a modern structure. This Collegewood viaduct is just outside Penryn Station on the Truro-to-Falmouth branch. It was 102 feet high and over 320 yards long, the longest of all on the railway.

Few engineers have achieved as much as he did. Not only did he •' design bridges and plan railways but he designed great docks, and constructed another Great Western. She was the first steamship to be employed in a regular service across the Atlantic, her voyages being made at an extremely fast speed. He went on to design the Great Britain, at first for paddles, but soon after he adapted her for the first screw propeller to be used in a liner. The crown of his achievements was the Great Eastern, which brought together the New World and the Old as it had never been thought possible before, for the Great Eastern was employed in the laying of the Transatlantic cable. Brunel unfortunately did not live to see this great event; the constant labours and anxiety which he underwent in achieving the Great Eastern killed him.

In the autumn of 1859 he went to see a trial run of his great ship in the Thames, and in this hour of triumph he was seized with sudden illness and died ten days later.