Santa Fe: (Archived Bridge Hunter; Bridge Hunter)
US-60: (Satellite)
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| Darel Maden posted Canadian River Historic Wagon Bridge Canadian texas Michael Rudnick: Been there. It's a very, very long bridge! |
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| HAER TX,106-CANA,1--4 |
Significance: This 3,255'-0"[992m]-long structure is the longest pin-connected bridge in Texas, and was the state's longest metal truss bridge prior to the completion of the Rainbow Bridge connecting Orange and Port Arthur in 1938. Two previous bridges at this site built in 1888 and 1889 were washed away by floods, and after some delays, voters finally approved a 1915 initiative to build a more permanent crossing of the river. The structure completed in 1916 included seventeen 155'-0" long and 27-0" high pinconnected Parker through trusses for a 2,635'-0" total length. The 16'-0" roadway rested atop concrete piers with steel footings driven 65'-0" into the riverbed. When high water widened the river in 1923, the county paid the Austin Bridge Company of Dallas to provide four additional Parker through trusses with the same dimensions and the same substructure. This increased the bridge's length by 620'-0". By the 1950s, the 16'-0" roadway had become too narrow to safely carry passing traffic. In 1953, a new $1 million concrete and steel structure, built with state highway funds by the Austin Bridge Company of Dallas, bypassed the original bridge. Today, the Canadian River Wagon Bridge carries a natural gas pipeline for the High Plains Natural Gas Company. Source: T. Lindsay Baker, Building the Lone Star State: An Illustrated Guide to Historic Sites (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1986), pp. 29-31. [HAER_data]HistoricBridges says it is now the longest pin-connected bridge in the country. Because it is so hard to get a photo of the whole bridge, HistoricBridges offers links to drone videos: Part 1 and Part 2.
I don't know if this is when it had 17 or 21 spans. But note that the Sante Fe bridge behind it had only four spans. But it looks like the rest of the railroad bridge is a wood trestle, so that would allow flood water to flow through.
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| Postcard via BridgeHunter_Wagon |
This confirms that the Sante Fe bridge used wooden trestles to allow the flood waters to pass through.
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| SMU Libraries Digital Collections Flickr Rise in Canadian River Sept. 8-'09. Rights: Please cite DeGolyer Library, Southern Methodist University when using this file. |
Obviously, these railroad bridges are built with steel girders.
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| cmh2315fl Flickr via ArchivedBridgeHunter_BNSF, License: Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike (CC BY-SA) BNSF Canadian River Railroad Bridges Deck plate girder BNSF railroad bridges over the Canadian River in Hemphill County, Arizona. The newer (left) bridge was completed in 2004. |
The new road bridge seems to leave open as big a floodplain as the old road bridge. The river must not flood a lot because there are a lot of big trees on it. There are so many trees that I can't get a good view of the old bridge.
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| Street View, Sep 2024 |
There are so many big trees, it is hard to even get a glimpse of the current road bridge. It looks like concrete girders to me. Is this the 1953 bridge or has there been another replacement?
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| Miles Holton, Aug 2021 |
The BNSF bridge has used an embankment instead of a trestle over half of the floodplain. But they have built that embankment much higher than the other bridges. Did they create a dam that they expect to funnel the flood waters to the spanned portion of the crossing? What kind of unexpected flow will that put on the older bridges?
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| Satellite |
Fortunately, this photo showed up a few days later. It shows that the current bridge is definitely a concrete girder bridge.
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| Darel Maden posted US 60 Canadian River |
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