3-021-448 - The Print Collector/Heritage Images

The Cam River improvements: dredging [just below the railway bridge] near Cambridge, 1869. Illustration of works '...for the improvement of the narrow and shallow river at Cambridge, with a view to the exercise of rowing...With a breadth in general not much exceeding twenty yards, and with several awkward corners in the length of one mile and three quarters below the railway bridge, to which the racing-boats are now confined, the available depth of the Cam has been diminished, in some places to less than two feet, by the deposit of mud, three or four feet thick...It is therefore intended...to dredge the river thoroughly for three miles and a half below Cambridge, so as to restore the channel to its former depth and width; the railway bridge is to be removed, and a new one to be constructed in its stead, without any piers in the river, so as to permit the boats to pass above it without shortening oars; and some of the corners will be rounded off by cutting the bank in an easier line. Mr. Clarke Hawkshaw, whose engineering services, as well as his father's, have liberally been placed at the disposal of the committee without pecuniary remuneration, superintends the execution of these works'. From "Illustrated London News", 1869.