Rockville Bridge

This is the Rockville Bridge, which crosses the Susquehanna River between Rockville (Susquehanna Township) and Marysville, Pennsylvania, just north of Harrisburg. It holds the record as the longest stone masonry arch railroad bridge in the world.

Under Chief Engineer William H. Brown, the Pennsylvania Railroad adopted a policy of replacing main-line bridges with stone arch structures, which required far less maintenance and offered maximum durability under increasingly heavy freight trains.

Construction began in April 1900 and finished in March 1902. Around 800 laborers—including hundreds of Italian stonemasons—built the structure from both sides of the river simultaneously.

The bridge features 48 arches, each 70 feet long, stretching a total length of 3,820 feet (1,164 meters). Built like an ancient Roman aqueduct, it consists of a concrete core faced with roughly 220,000 tons of local sandstone.

At the time this photo was taken (~1932), the bridge carried four main line tracks handling heavy freight and famous passenger trains like the Broadway Limited. In the 1980s, track layout modifications reduced the crossing from four tracks to three (and later two main lines).

The bridge was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1975 and named a National Historic Civil Engineering Landmark in 1979. It remains in heavy daily use today by Norfolk Southern Railway and Amtrak's Pennsylvanian route.