A witness to many floods, 150-year-old Lohe ka Pul still holds its own

It has withstood many floods, the most devastating of which was in 1978 when large parts of the city were submerged as the Yamuna’s water levels rose.

Incidentally, the construction of the structure began a year after the death of Bahadur Shah Zafar, the last Mughal emperor, who is said to have not been in favour of the East India Company’s plan for a bridge right behind the Red Fort.

According to historian Swapna Liddle, the construction of the bridge was no mean feat considering how wide the river was in the 19th Century.

She told The Indian Express: “Today, we see it (Yamuna) as a small river but historically, it is a very big river… to build a bridge like this across a huge river was technologically quite a feat.”

Before the Lohe ka Pul, also called Bridge number 249, was built, makeshift bridges fashioned out of boats were in use. “The Mughals, for instance, never built bridges spanning the full width of these rivers; they used bridges made of boats. The boats used to be tied across the banks of the river. In fact, even the British used the same bridge which used to be dismantled with the rise in Yamuna water levels during the monsoon,” she said.

On the bridge’s connection with the Railways, Liddle said, “When the Railways network started to be built, the British decided they wanted to have a line over the river as well… On the last day of 1867, the first train crossed the bridge and came into Delhi.”

Construction of the bridge was overseen by George Sibley, chief engineer of the northwest province of the East Indian Railway company. “The large bridge over the Jumna at Delhi was being rapidly pushed forward when the Government of India proposed that the line should proceed to Lahore, via Meerut and Saharanpur, instead of from Delhi, in a direct line to Ferozepur,” wrote George Huddlestone, in his book History of East Indian Railway: Volume I.

A famous tale attached to the bridge, once narrated by chronicler R V Smith, is of a father-son duo who worked as bridge guards on alternate days and nights during the 1950s. In addition to their guard duties, the duo had another job — recording water levels in the Yamuna, during winter and monsoon seasons.