All hail our Google overlords

I find it a bit disconcerting that Google seems to be taking over so much critical Internet infrastructure. And yet, it's hard to argue with the quality and sheer usefulness of their services.

Street View

The coverage available on Google Street View continues to rapidly expand, and now even inclues rural areas in some parts of the country. Take, for example, this bridge along a bypassed stretch of Route 66 in New Mexico. Based on the NBI data and satellite imagery, it appeared that this road was abandoned, but the Street View car made it down the road.

If you have an editor's account, you can now embed the Street View tool within the page for a bridge. First, track down the best Street View position and camera angle, and then copy the URL from the Google website (click the "Link" button at the top right). Edit the bridge and look for the "Street View" box where you can paste the link. I've created a category, Have street view, listing the bridges that have an embedded Street View widget.

News Archive

Almost as amazing as Street View, Google has been quietly scanning the historical archives of newspapers and making them available for free in one big searchable database under the umbrella of Google News. It's quite clever: the printed newspaper pages are treated similar to Google Maps, with the ability to zoom and pan.

Old newspapers are excellent for tracking down information and sometimes photos of lost bridges. From my hometown newspaper, I was able to find photos of historic bridges before they were replaced with UCEBs: see here, here and here. The newspaper photographed many interesting disasters and wrecks, including here, here, and here.

Other tidbits include a reprint of an early state highway map explaining the meanings of route shields (notice how US 66 was prematurely labeled as US 60 on this map) and an item from 1960 explaining how freeway interchanges work. Even if a local newspaper isn't available on Google, it may be possible to find wire (filler) stories about bridges elsewhere, such as this front-page photo describing the Spiral Bridge at Hastings, Minnesota, as a "freak."

The Street View and Google News Archive tools provide more then enough material to keep a researcher busy for a lifetime. And that doesn't include the other stuff that Google already has...

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Everything you know about the Royal Gorge Bridge is wrong

The owners of the Royal Gorge Bridge in Colorado have made a lot of money from tourists visiting the "highest bridge in the world" and staring down at the Arkansas River 1,053 feet below.

Except that the bridge isn't 1,053 feet high. And it's no longer the world's highest bridge. It's not even second.

Eric Sakowski of HighestBridges.com ranks the Royal Gorge Bridge as the 11th highest bridge in the world, although three of the bridges are under construction and haven't been completed yet.

The Royal Gorge Bridge quietly lost its title in 2001 thanks to a massive highway building program in China. It was first trumped by the Liuguanghe Bridge at 975 ft. high. Last year, on Nov. 15th, the Siduhe River Bridge opened and set the new world record at 1,550 ft. high.

Meanwhile, despite the tourist brochures stating otherwise, the Royal Gorge is not over a thousand feet high. The exact figure is still open to debate, but is well short of the 1,053 figure that everybody knows. Using a laser rangefinder, Eric Sakowski measured the height of the deck above the Arkansas River as 955 ft. Walt Lambert, engineer for the bridge's rehabilitation in 1983-84, reported a height of 968.4 ft.

After hearing about the HighestBridges.com website, officials at Royal Gorge recently took their own measurements and came up with a figure of 969 ft. I bet they aren't too thrilled about this revelation. The Colorado Springs Gazette quotes a spokeswoman for the bridge saying that the 1,053 figure was probably measured to the top of the towers. She said, "As far as we know, we're sticking with our 1,053 feet over the river."

However, if "height to the top of the towers" is the accepted measurement, then this means that the Royal Gorge is still trumped by another bridge, the Millau Viaduct in France with one tower rising over 1,100 feet.

I must confess a certain amount of glee about the Royal Gorge Bridge getting its comeuppance. I refuse to pay $24 per person just to visit a bridge, even if the ticket includes admission to other attractions. Come to think of it, Royal Gorge might hold the record as the world's most expensive toll bridge.

The height isn't the only problem with the bridge's reported measurements. During the 1980s rehabilitation, Walt Lambert discovered that the length of the main span was actually longer than everyone thought. The span length had always been accepted as 880 feet, a figure that the original designer, George Cole, had used in a 1930 article about the bridge.

The actual measurement is 938 feet, a number confirmed by Eric Sakowski using a rangefinder and then later by spot-checking with a tape measure.

Reportedly, George Cole's brother performed the original site survey and erroneously measured a distance of 880 feet between the proposed towers. The error wasn't discovered until after the towers were built. Cole covered for his brother and pretended that the length was 880 feet. In order to pay for the extra decking required by the longer span, it was necessary to fudge the accounting numbers and add bogus cost overruns to the steel used in the towers.

It's amazing that Cole was able to maintain the cover-up for so long, but nobody had any reason to question him. He built the darn thing, after all.

Now that the Royal Gorge Bridge has been scrutinized, I wonder what other famous bridges harbor engineering secrets? Has anybody independently verified the length of the Lake Pontchartrain Causeway?

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February news roundup

• I received a request to post a job opening for a "Historic Bridge Specialist" at the Massachusetts Department of Transportation in Boston. Here it is.

• Also in Massachusetts, an ugly battle is brewing over the fate of an 1894 footbridge in the Boston suburb of Brookline. The bridge, built as part of a park system by famed architect Frederick Law Olmsted, is slated to be rehabilitated and reopened to pedestrians. However, some local residents have been particularly outspoken against the plan, arguing that the bridge would attract more crime. It would be interesting to ask the opponents to find an example of another rehabilitated bridge in the U.S. that has caused a crime problem. I doubt that they could.

• The latest round of federal stimulus funding, announced Feb. 17, includes even more historic bridge demolition/replacement projects (see the list here in PDF form). Officials from Maine and New Hampshire applied for stimulus money to rehabilitate and save the Memorial Bridge at Portsmouth, NH, but their application was denied. If their proposal had said "tear down and replace" instead of "rehabilitate", I wonder if it would have been approved?

• Engineers at Cottage Grove, Oregon, are scrambling to find a way to save the Chambers Covered Railroad Bridge, the only remaining covered railroad bridge in Oregon (and one of the few anywhere). The bridge is leaning precariously after a January windstorm; it could collapse at any time.

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Some new features

For those who have an editor's account, I've recently added some new tools throughout the site:

• The Add bridge from map page lets you find the location of a bridge without knowing the county ahead of time. Use the Google Maps widget to track down the bridge site, either by searching or by zooming in. You can move the marker anywhere (left click to drag it, or right click to make it jump elsewhere). Once you've found the right spot, the system will try to determine the appropriate county and let you add the bridge there.

• You can also add a bridge by going to the National Bridge Inventory maps for each county. First, go to the main county page and click the "Import from NBI" button. Then look for the "View map" button in the top right corner. This will take you to an interactive "Exhibit" map showing the location of all of the NBI bridges with known GPS coordinates. The coordinates are frequently wrong -- sometimes they show up in the wrong state or even country -- but the map can help track down a particular bridge if all you know is the location.

• The Satellite and Street View features of Google Maps can be very useful to determine the current status of a bridge. On each bridge page, I've added an "Enlarge" button that blows up the map to make it easier to use the Satellite view. I've also included a link for viewing the location on Street View. Of course, many locations have not been visited by Google's Army of Privacy-Invading Photographers, in which case you will only see an ordinary map. If the location is available on Street View, you may need to rotate the camera angle, as it always begins pointing due north.

• I've added a Flash Upload tool to replace the buggy Java Upload tool. However, the Flash version seems to be just as buggy. I still recommend stashing your photos into a single ZIP file and uploading that using the standard upload page. You may also consider importing your photos from another website.

• If, by some miracle, you actually have time to kill, I've created a To-Do List page that shows the bridges on the website that need attention or updating.

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Studying portal braces

Warning: The following discussion is extremely geeky and not suitable for some audiences.

We all know the situation. You find a truss bridge that is well-preserved, except for one little detail: the plaques are missing, leaving only dangling mounting brackets to taunt you. Meanwhile, county records are spotty or non-existent, destroyed by the Great Courthouse Fire of Aught-Something.

How do you track down the history of the bridge? If you're lucky, the bridge has a distinctive feature that ties it to a particular company (like the 'X' scrollwork used by the Canton Bridge Co. above the portal). Otherwise, the design of the bridge will likely give a vague idea about the time frame, but probably not much else.

For through truss bridges, however, the arrangement of the portal bracing can yield important clues about the bridge's origin and builder.

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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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