Hornibrook Bridge

About

The Hornibrook Bridge is a heritage-listed, mostly-demolished road bridge that carried the Hornibrook Highway over Hays Inlet at Bramble Bay from Brighton, a suburb of the City of Brisbane, to Clontarf in the City of Moreton Bay. The bridge was designed by the renowned engineer Manuel Hornibrook and constructed from 1932 to 1935. It was added to the Queensland Heritage Register on 7 October 1994. Handsome art-deco concrete abutment arches frame the entry and exit approaches. Construction of the bridge was important for the growth of the Redcliffe Peninsula and made the commute to Brisbane shorter and quicker, increasing population growth and the number of visitors to the seaside town. The bridge was known colloquially by the locals as the "Humpity Bump" because the road surface of the bridge was so buckled. During king tides, waves would crash into (and sometimes onto) the bridge spraying the cars as they crossed. The bridge was operated and maintained by a private company and a toll charged until 1975, with toll booths located on the Clontarf (north) end. The Hornibrook Bridge was the first of three bridges to cross Bramble Bay. The second bridge is the publicly funded (non-tolled) Houghton Highway bridge, which was built with the intention of duplicating the crossing capacity of the two-lane Hornibrook Bridge in the 1970s, but the upgrading of the original Hornibrook Bridge w

Adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA). Photography via Wikimedia Commons.