Sydney Harbour Bridge

The building of the current Sydney harbour bridge can be said to have been started in 1890, when a royal commission determined that there was a heavy level of ferry traffic in the Sydney Harbour bridge area, best relieved with the construction of a bridge. Vehicular access to the north shore was undertaken with a series of smaller bridges located further westwards in the harbour, but this was insufficient for the traffic in the Sydney/North Sydney area. Designs and proposals were requested in 1900, but a formal proposal was not accepted until 1911. In 1912, John Bradfield was appointed chief engineer of the bridge project, which also had to include a railway. He completed a formal design - the now familiar single arch shape - in 1916, but plans to implement the design were postponed until 1922, primarily because of World War I.

In November, 1922, the NSW parliament passed laws that allowed the bridge's construction. Construction tenders for the bridge were requested the same year, and a British firm called Dorman Long and Co Ltd won. To offset concerns about a foreign firm participating in the project, assurances were given by Bradfield that the workforce building the bridge would all be Australians.

The building of the bridge coincided with the construction of a system of underground railways in Sydney's CBD, known today as the City Circle and the bridge was designed with this in mind. The bridge was designed to carry six lanes of road traffic, flanked by two railway tracks and a footpath on each side. Both sets of rail tracks were linked into the underground Wynyard railway station, on the south side of the bridge, by symetrical ramps and tunnels. As an interim measure, the eastern side railway tracks were to be used to carry trams from the north into a terminal within that station.