Industrial History: Three SOO Crossings over Mississippi River and CN Steam Locomotive

Saturday, May 11, 2024

Three SOO Crossings over Mississippi River and CN Steam Locomotive

1909 Blanchard Dam: (Archived Bridge Hunter; no Historic Bridges; Satellite, it is now a trail)

1905,1936 Camden Place: (Archived Bridge Hunter; Historic Bridges; Satellite)

They shared the Great Northern Bridge for their southern crossing of the Mississippi. Since that would have been for passenger trains, that crossing is no longer used.

See "The Rest of the Story" below as to why I researched three bridges at the same time.

Michael Kam posted
Crossing the Soo Line Bridge over the Mississippi, 12:50p [May 3, 2024]
[CPKC Empress 2816 heading to Chicago for a May 8 exhibition.]

Digitally Zoomed

Blanchard Crossing Bridge

BridgeHunter_blanchard
"Built in 1908 as part of the line from Brooten to Duluth; railline discontinued in 1993; rehabilitated for recreational use in 2006; reopened as a bike trail in 2007"

Camden Place Bridge

The bridge is 904' (276m) long with a main span of 125' (38m). [BridgeHunter_1905]

River View, Sep 2016

I presume they used a suspended steel girder span to increase the clearance over a navigation channel.

River View, Sep 2016

Street View, Jun 2019

The Rest of the Story

When I read the description on the Facebook post at the top of these notes, I did a search of the blog for the labels "wwMiss,rrWC", and got an empty result. So I did some research and found a Soo map.

Huntington

Since the Soo crossed the Mississippi in three places, I wrote a comment on the post asking for the location of the bridge in the photo. Unfortunately, when I submitted the comment, I got:

When I clicked the "Try again," I got the same result. After a few times, I was implementing the definition of insanity. (Keep trying the same thing with an expectation of a different result.) And then it would just hang with a "spinning circle." So I went on to plan B: document all three bridges. The crossing at Bowlus was easy.

For the two crossings at Minneapolis, I started with a "Minneapolis South" topo. I could not find any Soo tracks in that quadrant, so I got a "Minneapolis North" topo. That was a winner.

1952 Minneapolis North Quad @ 24,000

Satellite

Because of the suspended steel girder span in the middle of the bridge, it is easy to conclude that the Soo Line Bridge is the bridge in the photo. Camden Place is the northern neighborhood of Minneapolis. Since the Soo tracks are not labeled in the "Minneapolis South" topo, I got the topos "New Brighton" and "St Paul West," but I could not find the southernmost crossing in them. I suspected that they shared a bridge with someone else for their passenger service to Minneapolis and St Paul depots. Then John Marvig in Bridge Hunter and Historic Bridges provided the information that, indeed, the track going south in the "Minneapolis North" map connected to the Great Northern route across the Mississippi River.