Sunday, March 22, 2020

Ferry Dock and 5th Street Bridges at Ashtabula, OH

Ferry Dock: (It is upstream from the 5th Street Bridge, but I haven't figure out where)
Bobtail Bridge: (Bridge Hunter)
1925 Bridge: (Bridge Hunter; Historic BridgesSatellite)

I include the 5th Street bridges because I believe the bridge on the right side of this ferry photo is the bobtail bridge that was replaced by the 1925 Bridge.

Tim Foster posted
Ashtabula stern showing her "swinging door" seagate which she was built with. Foster collection.

Mike Harlan shared
Dale Pohto She was sunk on Sept 18, 1958 in collision with the str. Ben Moreell in outer harbor at Ashtabula OH. Aftr being raised, she was towed to her slip at Ashtabula, where she was scrapped by Acme Scrap Metal Co. in 1959. An underwriter was killed Nov 10, 1958 while inspecting the wreck. Her captain committed suicide before the Dec 10, 1958 U. S. Coast Guard hearing on the accident.
Jim Hall There is also a similar one sunk near Milwaukee.

Michael Meredith What ports did she run between?
Fred Bultman Ashtabula and Port Stanley. [All of the sources I've seen say Port Burwell, ON.]
A couple more photos of the ferry are on wrecksite.
An eBook has another photo.
Flickr photo of the ferry headed to Port Burwell "She was built in 1906, at the Great Lakes Engineering Works, in St. Clair, Michigan."

(new window)  This video confirms it used the Pennsy Railroad on the US side. The Canadian Pacific was its partner. It began service in July 1906. In 1916 the NYC launched a ferry service from Ashtabula. But it quit in 1932.


This is the oldest topo I could fine with a resolution better than 1:250,000. Since the ferry docked upstream from the bridge, I assume it was in either the slip now used by Ashatabula Yacht Club or the slip used by Kister Marina. A scene in the video rules out the yacht club. But there are no rails going to what is now the Kister Marina slip in the topo. Since the ferry was wrecked in 1958, the dock's tracks would have been abandoned. Perhaps three years is enough time for the abandonment to be reflected in the map.
1961 Ashtabula Quadrangle @ 1:24,000

Bobtail Bridge


Evidently what is now Sutherland Marine used to be those coal storage piles and this boat is headed upstream. So the ferry in the above photo has just passed this bridge and is headed downstream.
Old Postcard via Bridge Hunter
Flickr photo of the bridge in the closed position


1925 Bridge


Historic Bridges explains that the design of this bridge is a Brown Bascule Bridge. As far as I'm concerned, it is simply a variant of Strauss Trunnion design. So I labeled these notes as bridgeStrauss as well as bridgeRare. Historic Bridges provides a link to the 1922 patent, but I'm not going to read it to figure out why it qualifies as a different design.

Photo via Bridge Hunter
Photo taken by Michael Miller in December 2019
License: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike (CC BY-NC-SA)

Photo via Bridge Hunter
Partially open bridge from northwest
Photo taken by Josh Schmid in September 2018
License: Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike (CC BY-SA)

8:02 video with various views of the bridge and its surrondings. The lift starts at 3:12. I think the bridges in Chicagoland are faster. And it kept going up after both boats had passed underneath. At least it didn't go all of the way up.




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