1903 AVR/Pennsy Brilliant Branch Cutoff Viaduct over Former Silver Lake

(Broken Archived Bridge Hunter; Historic Bridges; pghbridges; Satellite)

AVR = Allegheny Valley Railroad

Street View, Aug 2011

Dave Kuntz posted four photos with the comment: ""PRR prided itself as the 'The Standard Railroad of the World.' They sure lived up to it, and perhaps went overboard, with the Brilliant Cutoff Viaduct, built in 1903 a little east of Pittsburgh. This impressive 6 arch span was on a merely secondary mainline and is currently under negotiation to become a bike trail.

Steve Raith: This section of the line is operated by Carload Express (Allegheny Valley Railroad - AVR) and is used as their connection to Norfolk Southern. It’s the other end of the line, the big bridge over the Allegheny River that will have the bike trail on it. The rail line might share half of the right of way with the railroad, but the tracks are not being removed. Allegheny Valley Railroad still uses these bridges to take freight to Daily’s Juice plant in Verona and to access others customers towards Pittsburgh.

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Street View, Aug 2023

Pete Steffey commented on Dave's post
This is a photo of the lake, called Silver Lake.

The lakes along the cutoff on this map is how I found the viaduct. I included the bridge over the Allegheny River at the north end of the cutoff.

1904/04 Mc Keesport Quad @ 62,500

The Bridge Hunter link is broken so I can only access the index entry.

Bridge Hunter

pghbridges
"Lincoln Av (left) crosses above Washington Blvd and through Brilliant Cutoff Viaduct (right)"
[In addition to details about the bridge, this page has information on the Allegheny Valley Railroad and the Brilliant Oil Refinery.]

William Henry Brown (1830-1910) was appointed Engineer for U.S. Military Railroad in northern Virginia in October of 1861. He served in the Second Bull Run and Front Royal campaigns of the Civil War. In 1871, Brown wrote He became Engineer of Maintenance of Way for the Pennsylvania Railroad in July 1874. He was promoted to the new office of Chief Engineer in June 1881 and began a twenty-year-long program to replace all major bridges over non-navigable streams with stone arches which are resistant to floods, require less maintenance and able to handle increasing weight of newer steam engines.

Part of the PRR stone arch bridge program was the construction of the world's longest stone arch bridge (3,820 ft long; 48 arch spans of 70 ft each) over the Susquehanna River at Rockville, PA. Completed in 1902, the bridge stills stands despite other truss bridges having been damaged or destroyed by flooding during Hurricane Agnes in 1972. Completed as the Brilliant Cutoff construction was beginning, there are similarities in construction of the Rockville Bridge -- the latter described by William D. Middleton as: "The arch rings were built with 42-inch thick limestone blocks, while the piers and spandrel walls were built with stones that varied from 18 to 24 inches. Piers, the spandrel walls above the piers, and the tops of the arches were filled in with Portland cement concrete. The concrete tops of the arches were covered with asphalt to provide a watertight surface, and the structure was then filled with cinders to the level of the track ballast."

[pghbridges]