Kinzua Bridge
Interesting facts
- The 1882 bridge went up without scaffolding: a crane built on top of each finished tower was used to raise the next one, all the way across 20 towers.
- Six of the original bridge's twenty towers were taller than the Brooklyn Bridge, and excursion trains came from Buffalo and Pittsburgh just to cross it.
- The first bridge used hollow wrought-iron Phoenix columns, so slender that many people believed the viaduct was built of wooden poles.
- Trains were limited to 5 miles per hour on the bridge, because locomotives and sometimes the wind made the whole structure vibrate.
- According to local lore, a bank robber hid 40,000 dollars in gold and currency under or near the bridge, and people came hunting for it.
- Train crews liked to send a rookie brakeman across the car roofs just before the bridge, leaving him staring 300 feet down from a rocking boxcar.
- In the 1900 rebuild each new steel tower and its spans took only a week, yet the designer later admitted the old anchor bolts should have been replaced.
- The salvage firm that bought the bridge in 1959 refused to scrap it, and Pennsylvania bought the structure and land for just 50,000 dollars in 1963.
- The 2003 tornado was only an F1, but winds of at least 94 mph hit the bridge side-on and destroyed the century-old structure in under 30 seconds.
- Before collapsing, three of the towers were lifted off their foundations and set down upright again, held together only by the rails on top.
Why it is worth it
A line of steel towers marches out across the wooded Kinzua Creek valley in northern Pennsylvania and then stops in mid-air; below it, the rest of the structure lies twisted on the valley floor where a tornado threw it in 2003. The Kinzua Bridge was once the tallest railway viaduct in the world, and its broken remains have become one of the most striking engineering ruins in North America.
The first bridge was designed by the engineer Octave Chanute and put up by the Elmira Bridge Company in 1882 in just 94 working days. Built of wrought iron on 20 towers, it was about 2,050 feet (625 m) long and 301 feet (92 m) high, and its promoters advertised it as the "Eighth Wonder of the World". It held the world height record for two years, until the Garabit viaduct in France opened in 1884. By the end of the century trains had grown too heavy for the iron structure, and in 1900 it was dismantled and rebuilt in steel to a design by C. R. Grimm. Commercial traffic on the Erie Railroad line continued until 1959, after which the bridge was sold for scrap — and then bought by the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania in 1963 to become the centrepiece of a state park.
On 21 July 2003 a tornado struck the viaduct broadside and knocked down 11 of the 20 towers within seconds. Investigators found that the original iron anchor bolts from 1882, never replaced in the rebuilding, had corroded badly. Rather than reconstruct the bridge, the state turned the surviving towers into the Kinzua Sky Walk, opened in 2011: a pedestrian walkway out over the valley that ends in an observation deck with a glass floor, looking down onto the wreckage still lying where it fell. The bridge was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1977 and named a National Historic Civil Engineering Landmark in 1982.
Getting there
The bridge is the centrepiece of Kinzua Bridge State Park in McKean County, Pennsylvania, near the borough of Mount Jewett and just off U.S. Route 6. Bradford Regional Airport (BFD) is about 6 km away in a straight line. The nearest larger city is Jamestown, New York, about 65 km to the north-west.
On these lists
From the encyclopaedia
The Kinzua Bridge or the Kinzua Viaduct was a railroad trestle that spanned Kinzua Creek in McKean County in the U.S. state of Pennsylvania. The bridge was 301 feet (92 m) tall and 2,052 feet (625 m) long. Most of its structure collapsed during a tornado in July 2003.
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