On This Day: Queen opens Scottish Forth Road Bridge

SEPT 4, 1964

: The Queen opened the Forth Road Bridge on this day in 1964 – with the Scottish suspension crossing becoming the biggest in the world outside the U.S.

The 1.6-mile-long structure, which spans the Firth of Forth estuary and connects Fife and Edinburgh, overlooks the more iconic red rail bridge that was built in 1890.

It replaced a boat service that had been in use for more than 800 years and inspired the names for the North Queensferry and South Queensferry districts on each shore.

A British Pathé newsreel filmed hundreds of schoolchildren among the 1,400 guests – including Prime Minister Alec Douglas Home- invited to the opening ceremony.

It also showed the unfortunately thick mist shrouding the bridge, with the reporter adding: “In Great Britain, weather is no respecter of great occasions.”

The Queen, who was then 38, arrived in South Queensferry by car and stepped up to give a speech that reminded people that she had not been born when planning began.

She then drove over to the bridge, which cost £20million to build over a six years, to the Fife side of the structure at North Queensferry.

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The Queen was met by hundreds more cheering people before she and the Duke of Edinburgh took the last ever ferry service across the Forth.

The newsreel also remarked upon the contemporary anger over the bridge becoming a toll road despite its cost being less than motorways.

Levies were supposed to end when the cost of the building the structure and any interest charges were repaid in 1993.

But authorities continued with the toll – a fee of between £1 and £4 depending on the time of day - until 2008 when it was finally scrapped by the Scottish government.

Today, 65,000 vehicles cross the structure, which contains a dual carriageway with two lanes in either direction.

In the last 49 years, the Forth Road Bridge has slipped from overall fourth place to become the 26th longest suspension bridge in the world.

Back in 1964, the three biggest were all in the U.S - with San Francisco’s Golden Gate in number one position, although today it has fallen to 11th place.

But in 2005, serious structural faults were found on the Forth Road Bridge which will need fixing by 2020.

So, in 2011, construction began on the replacement Queensferry Crossing, which will be a 1.7-mile-long cable-style structure that is estimated to cost up to £4.2billion.

It is hoped that it will be completed by 2016, when it will host the majority of traffic in and out of Scotland’s capital city.

At that point the nearby Forth Road Bridge will undergo massive structural upheaval and later be used for public transport only.