The Quebec Bridge

The Quebec Bridge is a road, rail and pedestrian bridge across the lower Saint Lawrence River between Sainte-Foy (since 2002 a western suburb of Quebec City) and Lévis, Quebec, Canada. The building project failed twice, at the cost of 88 lives, and took over 30 years to complete.

The Quebec Bridge is a riveted steel truss structure and is 987 m (3,238 ft) long, 29 m (95 ft) wide, and 104 m (341 ft) high. Cantilever arms 177 m (581 ft) long support a 195 m (640 ft) central structure, for a total span of 549 m (1,801 ft), still the longest cantilever bridge span in the world. (It was the all-categories longest span in the world until the Ambassador Bridge was completed in 1929.) It is the easternmost (farthest downstream) complete crossing of the Saint Lawrence.

The bridge accommodates three highway lanes (none until 1929, one until 1949, two until 1993), one rail line (two until 1949), and a pedestrian walkway (originally two); at one time it also carried a streetcar line. It has been owned by the Canadian National Railway since 1993. (Wikipedia)

This famous bridge graced the front page of Geoff Wright’s wonderful book of Meccano Supermodels. Smaller version occurred in some manuals but I have not often seen it modelled at this scale, perhaps because of its sheer size. I decided to build exactly half of it and to add a large mirror to the centre point to suggest the rest. Anything more would have taken up far too much table-space!

My version is almost entirely Meccano, but a few pieces of Erector and Stokys add some decoration and model die-cast cars add an idea of scale.