[3] The bridge was opened by King Edward VII and Queen Alexandra on 10 July 1906, despite being still unfinished at this time.

The construction of the King Edward VII Bridge provided four more railway tracks and a direct line through the station, enabling trains to arrive or depart from either side, greatly easing congestion.

[2] By the 1890s, the sheer amount of traffic crossing the High Level Bridge, roughly 800 train and light engine movements every day, had become a major concern of the NER, who operated services across it.

c. ccxxx), which included the construction of another railway bridge over the Tyne among its provisions, received royal assent.

[5] In its original proposed form, the new bridge followed a functional design developed by Charles Augustus Harrison, chief engineer of the NER.

[3] The revised design remained a lattice girder bridge that carried four railway tracks, but featured a total of four spans over the River Tyne.

[2] This was known to be dangerous work even for the time; as such, no one under the age of 40 could be employed in this capacity and each man spent just four hours per shift in the caissons.

[4] Other workers became ill as a result of breathing in sulphuretted hydrogen, which seeped from the coal seams that the foundations were dug into.

[2] Rock was excavated from inside the caissons by blasting; the workers took refuge in an air-locked chamber in the access shaft while charges were being detonated.

Once excavation work was finished, the caissons were filled with roughly 28,450 tonnes of concrete and piers constructed on top of them.

Following the completion of the bridge, the cableway was dismantled and the cable was transported to the Swan Hunter and Wigham Richardson shipyard in Wallsend, where it was reused in the launch of the ocean liner RMS Mauretania.

[2] On 27 September 1906, the effectiveness of the structure was demonstrated via the running of ten locomotives, weighing around 100 tons each, coupled together in two sets of five, over the bridge at a leisurely speed of 6–8 mph (10–13 km/h).