In my last two blogs I talked about Bordeaux's first bridge, le Pont de Pierre, and the city's recently inaugurated Pont Chaban-Delmas. Today's post finishes that topic.
Until the construction of Bordeaux's second bridge there was no direct rail service from Paris to the region south of the Garonne. All of the railcars coming from the north had to be ferried across the river to Bordeaux's St. Jean Station before continuing on to Bayonne and the fashionable resorts that were springing up along the Atlantic coast. Each ferry had to wait for low tide before squeezing carefully through the arches of the Pont de Pierre, adding hours to every voyage and inconveniencing travelers in much the same way that the lack of a bridge had delayed Napoleon half a
century earlier.
But in 1860 the two banks of the Garonne were permanently connected by a cast iron bridge, finally enabling rail passengers to travel easily from Paris to Bordeaux and further south. The construction of this bridge was the first project of Gustav Eiffel, the 26-year old railroad employee who oversaw its completion.
