Saraighat Bridge

Saraighat Bridge was the first bridge built across the Brahmaputra river — opened in 1962 after decades of British and post-Independence planning. Until its construction, the only crossing of the Brahmaputra was by rail-ferry between Pandu (Guwahati) and Amingaon, which severely limited northeast India's connectivity to the rest of the country.

The bridge takes its name from the Battle of Saraighat (1671), where Lachit Borphukan's Assamese forces defeated a Mughal army at this site on the Brahmaputra. Cleveland Bridge & Engineering of Darlington, UK fabricated the steelwork (Cleveland had also built the Howrah Bridge two decades earlier); HCC executed the substructure including the deep pneumatic caissons sunk through 25-30 m of Brahmaputra alluvium to bedrock.

The bridge has a double-deck configuration: the lower deck carries a single broad-gauge railway track operated by Northeast Frontier Railway, the upper deck carries two lanes of road traffic forming part of NH-37. Three 122 m suspended-span sections rest on cantilever-anchor arms, with the entire steelwork riveted to 1950s British practice.

A second parallel bridge — the New Saraighat Bridge — was opened in 2017 to relieve traffic on the original. The 1962 bridge remains in continuous service, restricted now to lighter vehicles.