The longest cantilever bridge ever built, it had to support the load of heavy steam locomotives.

The girder work, weighing a massive 3,300 tons, was manufactured in London by the firm of Westwood, Baillie and erected by F.E.

[2] The Indus was bridged at Attock in 1887 and that allowed railways in India to run from the westernmost post of Khyber Pass to the eastern city of Calcutta.

India's rail link to the port of Karachi was however, still broken at the Indus flowing between the towns of Rohri and Sukkur.

Kipling, CIE, Principal of the Mayo School of Art in Lahore and father of Joseph Rudyard, the famous poet and author) which held shut the cumbersome iron gates guarding entry to the bridge.

The bridge provided the railway link between Lahore, in the heart of the granary of British India, and the port of Karachi on the Arabian Sea.

"[citation needed] The consulting engineer was David B. Steinman[4] of New York, proponent of 'vocational aesthetics'.

An engineer by the name of Sir Alexander Rendel was then called in and he proposed a design consisting of two anchored cantilevers, each 310 feet long, carrying a suspended span of 200 ft in the middle.

The 170 feet tall cantilevers of the bridge when assembled, made quite a conspicuous scene in London.

Giant derricks, each weighing 240 tons and each being 230 feet in length had to be erected leaning out over the water and at the same time they had to incline inwards in the plane at right-angles to the line of the bridge.

This plan did not work in practice as the Indus remained quite violent 6 months of the year owing to floods.

In the end, Robertson built another temporary bridge to provide a platform on which the suspended span could be put together.