Boonville Bridge saved!

Last week, I speculated that the stimulus money awarded for high-speed rail projects might have the pleasant side effect of saving the Katy Bridge at Boonville, Missouri.

Today it was announced that the bridge's present owner, Union Pacific, will turn over the bridge to the City of Boonville for future rehabilitation into a pedestrian/bicycle crossing as part of the Katy Trail.

Restoring the bridge will be expensive, but a good chunk of the cost can be covered by private donations already pledged to the Save the Katy Bridge Coalition. With the threat of demolition apparently removed, the restoration doesn't have to be completed all at once.

The tunnel at nearby Rocheport attracts a tremendous number of tourists each year to the Katy Trail (just try finding a parking spot in Rocheport during a nice summer weekend). After the bridge is restored, Boonville will replace Rocheport as the number one landmark along the entire Katy Trail. The project, dare I say it, could be quite a boon to Boonville.

Update Friday, Feb. 5: Here's an updated story from the Boonville Daily News.

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Something rotten in New Jersey, Part 2

A few months ago I mentioned a ridiculous story from New Jersey about local officials refusing to release the engineering assessment for a rural truss bridge because of "national and local security reasons."

I didn't realize that there was even more ridiculousness involved. Mercer County wanted to build a replacement bridge intentionally designed with a 4-ton weight limit to keep big trucks away from using the road.

Here's the juicy quote from nj.com:

"We're determined to build a bridge that's safe and secure for emergency vehicles," said Mercer County Executive Brian Hughes. "The residents are afraid it will become a cut-through for truck traffic to Route 31, but we've already lowered the weight requirement to four tons (on the proposed bridge), so that's not a valid argument."

As I've said before, you can't make this stuff up. The county intended to replace a bridge with a 3-ton weight limit (before it was closed) with a bridge with a 4-ton weight limit. Brilliant! I didn't realize that extra ton could make such a difference for safely supporting fire trucks.

Mercer County has dropped that silly idea and will now build a standard UCEB without any built-in obsolescence. Local opposition to the new bridge is fierce, as it will likely obliterate the site along Jacobs Creek where George Washington nearly fell to his death, a pivotal moment in American history. The bridge debate reportedly changed the outcome of the last township election.

The old bridge, a rare 1882 wrought-iron through truss by the King Bridge Company, is slated to be relocated and preserved at a local park. I'll believe it when I see it.

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Stimulus money might help save the Boonville Bridge in Missouri

Today's announcement by the White House to spend $8 billion on high-speed rail projects might provide an unexpected bonus: the preservation of the Boonville Railroad Bridge. Until now, Union Pacific, the owner of the bridge, has intended to reuse some of the approach spans for a new bridge at Osage City, Missouri.

Missouri will receive $31 million in rail stimulus grants, much of which is earmarked to construct a new bridge at Osage City. Since it now appears Union Pacific won't need to recycle the Boonville Bridge, it seems possible that the bridge can be saved.

Of course, there's still the small matter of battling the Coast Guard, which considers the bridge a hazard to navigation on the Missouri River. Money will also need to be raised to restore and operate the bridge for pedestrian/bicycle use.

With so many bridges over the Missouri River dropping like flies lately, hopefully this significant bridge can be saved while filling an ugly gap in the Katy Trail.

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Let's Play "Name That Truss!"

One of the major goals of this website is to categorize bridges by a wide variety of things: their design, status, builders, location, and more. For truss bridges, the design types (Pratt, Howe, Warren, etc.) are fairly well established, but not completely. Sources don't always agree about the design for a particular bridge. Engineers liked to experiment, producing oddball designs that don't quite fit within the standard categories. Other times, the design might be fairly common, but lies within a grey area that makes it hard to classify.

Here are some examples that I've pulled from this site. How would you classify these bridges?

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Bridge opponents have a new talking point

"The bridge was meant for commerce. It's not meant to be a museum."
-- State Sen. J. Barry Stout, D-Bentleyville, Pennsylvania

"[D]eveloping a one-lane rural bridge museum just isn't as high a priority as some of these other items we're dealing with."
-- Al Forsberg, engineer for Blue Earth County, Minnesota

Here we have two different bridges in two different states, the Charleroi-Monessen Bridge of Pennsylvania and the Dodd Ford Bridge of Minnesota. The opponents of preserving these National Register bridges were both quoted in newspapers this week using the same talking point, scoffing at the notion of treating these bridges as "museums."

A quick Google search, however, reveals that Sen. Stout was for museums before he was against them. The Oct. 22, 1994, edition of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reports:

With the receipt of a $240,000 federal grant, the Pennsylvania Trolley Museum in Chartiers is on track to complete a 2-mile-long trolley line that will serve as a tourist attraction and shuttle from Country Club Road to the Washington County Fairgrounds.

"Today is an important day in Washington County," said state Sen. J. Barry Stout, the Bentleyville Democrat who shepherded the federal grant from the U.S. Department of Transportation to the museum. "Everyone is in love with trains and trolleys. This is an opportunity to have living history."

It gets better. Last year, Sen. Stout procured even more money for the trolley museum, this time to build a "solar-powered trolley line." Stout, of course, is all too eager to boast about landing this grant on his website.

Funny, isn't it? The Charleroi-Monessen Bridge is an actual historic site, but Stout is only interested in giving money to a museum project that is clearly not historic. (How many solar-powered trolleys were ever built during the 19th Century?)

The situation in Minnesota isn't quite as absurd, as supporters of saving the bridge were able to obtain a small grant to study options for preserving it. Nevertheless, the comment from the county engineer treating "museum" as a dirty word is distressing. It's a shame that modern engineers are only interested in a bridge if it's a massive concrete blob capable of carrying 10,000 SUVs at a time.

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Jason's Bridge Picks for the First Decade of the 3rd Millennium

Fellow Pontists and Bridge lovers,

It is very difficult to describe the first decade of the third millennium in terms of historic bridges and all the attempts of preserving them, because as was mentioned already, there are many bridge examples that either met the wrecking ball, fell victim to stupidity among the drivers, or were wiped out due to natural disasters. However, I have picked out some of the high- and lowlights that made this decade a "lost decade" for bridge preservation, with the goal of addressing this issue to politicians and other interested alike and finding ways to preserve what is left to preserve before they are gone forever. This decade is pretty much a clean slate to right the wrongs committed a decade earlier. For each category, I picked out the top three examples with some comments to go along with that. I hope in the future that my picks will take place at the beginning of each year as a way of looking back at what was accomplished in terms of historic bridge preservation and which bridge met its unnecessary doom. So without further ado, here it goes:

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New year, new features

For New Years Day, I was going to write a retrospective of the last decade. But since most of the last 10 years involved bulldozing, blowing up, demolishing, condemning, annihilating, pulverizing, obliterating, or wiping out historic bridges to make way for ugly replacements, a Decade In Review article didn't sound like much fun.

So, I've been working on new features for the website. Succumbing to peer pressure, I've added Bridgehunter.com to YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook:

• The items shown on the Updates page are now fed to Twitter under the name Bridgehuntercom. ("Bridgehunter" was already taken by somebody in South Africa.)
• You can become a fan over at Facebook.
• I've added tools to allow embedding YouTube videos on each bridge page. These will appear on the new Videos page.
• This site now has some belated social-networking features. If you have an editor's login, you can go to the My Settings page and check "Enable my profile page" to share a biography and list of recent updates you've made.
• Check out the new Users page to see who has uploaded the most photos. Yes, that's right, J.R. Manning is in the lead.
• If you don't like to wade through listings for modern bridges (built after 1970) or bridges that have been demolished, you can now go to the My Settings page and choose to have those bridges removed or greyed out. If you don't have an editor's account, you can register here.

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Yes, Virginia, historic bridges do attract tourists

It's nice to see a positive headline for a change. The Poughkeepsie Journal reports, New walkway exceeds expectations, as folks flock to bridge.

Opened to pedestrians in October as a New York State Park, the Poughkeepsie Railroad Bridge over the Hudson River has turned into a tourist magnet. To borrow an old phrase, "If you restore it, they will come." By rehabilitating the bridge, New York State has been able to turn a dangerous liability into a tourism centerpiece.

When a historic bridge project is proposed, opponents usually scoff at the tourism potential, saying something like, "Nobody will want to come visit a rusty hulk." The reality, as seen in Poughkeepsie and other cities, is that people really do appreciate these projects.

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Crown Point (Champlain) Bridge demolition imminent

The demolition of the Crown Point Bridge between New York and Vermont is scheduled for this Monday, Dec. 28.

While the design of the replacement bridge has not been selected, an online survey revealed that most people had an unfavorable opinion of the UCEB options (steel girder or segmental concrete). The cable-stayed alternatives didn't fare well, either, leaving a network tied-arch design as the most popular.

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A sliver of good news

Back in February, Missouri made the news by being the first state to take advantage of federal stimulus funding. Unfortunately, the project involved replacing a rare truss bridge with a UCEB, a pattern that has been repeated all year with other stimulus projects.

It's not all hopeless, however. Stimulus finding has been approved to rehabilitate the Inner Grove Heights Bridge in Minnesota to be used as a pedestrian pier. With the main span across the Mississippi River already demolished, this isn't a clear victory, but at least the money is being used to preserve something instead of tearing down the entire bridge.

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