The completion of the Tamiang bridge was the finishing, in November 1913, of the fairly large bridge over the Tamiang river at Kwalla Simpang on the line of the Atjeh-tram, which had long held up the further extension of the tramway toward the south-east of Atjeh. The traveller W. Moens, who was then at Kwalla Simpang in the course of his journey through Atjeh, recorded that the further construction of the line had been temporarily checked by the necessity of throwing over the Tamiang river a rather large bridge — een werkje, dat veel oponthoud heeft ondervonden (a work that had suffered much delay) — and that he was precisely permitted to witness how de laatste spanning dezer brug op haar plaats geschoven werd, waardoor de overbrugging een feit was — the last span of the bridge was slid into its place, whereby the bridging was an accomplished fact.
Significance
The completion of the Tamiang bridge is significant in the account of the pacified Atjeh as a marker of the state of the engineering works: the same tramway that during the war had crept forward as a military line under fortresses, and whose extension the Atjehnese chiefs themselves named as the proof that the government means it now, was in November 1913 carried bodily across the great river that had been the frontier of the war expeditions of 1893 — the naval expeditions against Tamiang of twenty years before. With the bridging accomplished, the terminus at Kwalla Simpang ceased to be provisional, and the way stood open for the projected continuation of the line and the junction with the Deli railways by which the traffic of Atjeh was to compete for the rice and export trade of the East Coast of Sumatra.
See Also
- Tamiang
- Koeala Simpang
- Atjeh-tram
- Construction of the Atjeh-tram (1875–1914)
- Expedition against Tamiang (1893)
- Moens’ journey through Atjeh (November 1913)
- 1913
Source
Reisindrukken van Atjeh, door W. Moens, oud-luitenant ter zee (Amsterdam: Jacob van Campen, 1914), p. 11. OCR-filename: 20260716_140310_DLP-99-Reisindrukken_van_Atjeh_Nemotron-OCR-v2_OCR.txt.