WACR/Boston & Maine Bridge in White River Junction

(Bridge Hunter, Satellite)

WACR = Washington County Railroad

From what little I have studied of New England railroads, it seems the B&M got split up into a lot of small pieces. Bridge Hunter indicates that Karley's comment below is wrong because this bridge is not part of the Vermont Railway.

Karley Kuehl posted two photos with the comment:

To paraphrase another report, "With no ocean coastline, Vermont might have seemed an unlikely candidate to be devastated by a hurricane" When 10 inches of rain hits a mountainous region, it's pretty scary stuff. It will be 7 years later this month that this state got a swift kick in the groin area courtesy of Mother Nature and hurricane Irene. Needless to say numerous railroad operations were crippled. The pictures are the White River crossing of Vermont Railway in White River Junction Vermont. It was closed the longest of all repairs that took place, as they ended up replacing the entire pier.

Anthony Migliaccio Classic pier scouring example. Wow
Tom Mason how does that happen?
Harley Kuehl the raging currents washed out all the rock away from the pier foundation...working for Claremont Concord RR, we had to have the bridge across the Conn River checked as well after the flood receded.

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A street view shows a remaining stone pier for this 1936 bridge and the 2011 emergency repair pier.

Street View

Satellite

I include a copy of the satellite image because I wanted to capture the water turbulence that is downstream of the original pier. Note that the axis of the turbulence is at an angle with the axis of the stone pier. That means the original piers were not built parallel to the flow of the river. That additional turbulence would increase the scour action of a flood. The new pier has a different angle so that it is parallel with the flow.

Below is a photo of an abandoned IC bridge on the Wabash River. It is another example of a pier lost because of scouring. For a while, a span had one end in the river and the other end was still on a pier. But before I could get a photo, they had removed the bad pier and the two spans it supported. In this case the pier scour was caused by a change in the river current. Notice the trees and sandbar under the swing span. Since that is where the navigation channel used to be, that was the deepest part of the river. (At the time of publication of this post, this photo is also the cover photo of the blog. But I include a copy here in case I ever change the cover photo.)

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Satellite

In this satellite image, the state boundary shows the original river channel. The river cut a new channel. That is what changed the flow under the bridge. The currents have also changed under the I-64 bridge, and at least one pier on the Illinois side had (still has?) problems. So pier scour can impact more modern bridges as well as old bridges.