How the Algebuckina Bridge linked outback SA to the world

It is one of South Australia's great engineering feats, but it is not a highway or a stylish building in Adelaide's CBD.

It is a bridge located in a remote part of the state's outback.

At nearly 600 metres long and constructed from Victorian-era wrought iron, the Algebuckina Bridge crosses the floodplain of the Neales River — but would look right at home spanning across any of the great rivers of Europe.

Instead, this colossal piece of 19th century engineering sits on a disused railway line nearly 1000 kilometres north of Adelaide.

So how on earth did it get there?

Laying track across the outback

In the 1860's more and more South Australians had moved into the arid regions in the state's north, and demand for mass transportation was growing.

One of the men cataloguing the history of Australia's inland railways is Jeremy Browne, a trustee of the National Railway Museum, and a founding member of the Pichi-Richi Railway Preservation Society.

"People had started to spread up into the outback, there was a lot of grazing and copper mining in the Flinders Ranges and getting that product to Port Augusta was very expensive and difficult.

"There was also a desire from Adelaide to attach the Northern Territory firmly to South Australia, and one of the ways to do that was to build a railway to Darwin, and that was the original concept."

Mr Browne said there was a lot of pressure put on the government to build a railway.

"They tried some private schemes, but that didn't work very well," he said.

"No one was willing to take it up even though they were offered a lot of free land."

The government eventually decided to take on the project itself, first building a line between Port Augusta and Quorn, before extending it to Marree.

But once it got north of Marree, the builders ran into a problem.

Drought and floods

In the heart of outback South Australia lies Australia's largest ephemeral salt lake — Kati Thanda-Lake Eyre — and the area surrounding it is scarred by the rivers and creeks that make up the Lake Eyre Basin.

According to Mr Browne, that is where the real work began.

"The creeks are normally dry, but when it rains in the outback it rains heavily," Mr Browne said.

"The ground's hard, so it doesn't soak in, it tends to run off.

Some creeks could be crossed with smaller bridges, like the bridge at Curdimurka, but the Neales River was a different beast entirely.

Construction on the Algebuckina Bridge began in 1890, with government labourers working to build it by hand.

"It was fabricated at Kilkenny in Adelaide and shipped up on the railways itself and assembled on site," Mr Browne said.

"The whole thing was built by unemployed labourers, which in many cases were quite unskilled in that sort of work.

"Of course, they had no machinery, they just had horse carts, wheelbarrows, picks and shovels."

Mr Browne said the columns were round cast iron that came from England, and were carted up on the railway and then erected with a trestle.

Despite construction continuing relatively smoothly, the bridge wasn't finished on time.

"The bridge wasn't actually finished when the railway was opened to Oodnadatta," Mr Browne said.

"They temporarily laid tracks across the river until the bridge was finished."

He said despite the delay, the bridge proved itself to be up to the task.

"The temporary tracks on the other hand were washed away on three separate occasions."

Myths and Legends

The old Ghan railway closed in 1980, replaced by the current line which operates today, and while most of the tracks have been ripped up, Algebuckina stands as a monument to the railway which formed the backbone of central Australia.

Despite its remarkable history, one myth about the bridge has refused to go away.

"Murray Bridge was built earlier and it's quite a different bridge"