AVI Little Arkansas River Bridge

Great pictures Daniel. This group of bridges have stood for a long time abandoned and undocumented. It's nice to see the information coming together on this site.

pictures taken 5/11/2013

Mr. Vance:

I learned this information from a local. She will try to photograph this bridge soon.

Sorry-silly ipad keeps logging me out. That was my anonymous below.

I'm really pleased that Robert did the legwork to find the local name, thus removing the "mystery" from this one. Did you talk with someone directly or hear it from someone...?

Still need to get down there for a few pics. My summer has evaporated too quickly and semester starts soon....

Anonymous is exactly right. This makes six confirmed extant bridges for this route. This is impressive given the fact that this railroad was abandoned 70 years ago.

Sheldon--you discovered the AVI bridge east of here. it's another concrete arch. This opened up several more discoveries of other long abandoned bridges on this old interurban railroad.

Arkansas Valley Interurban.

What's an A.V.I.?

Great discovery - that link contains some good information which may confirm our suspicions, assuming that this is the correct abandoned bridge.

This transcript of a 2003 radio program mentions a bridge east of Halstead and claims that it was once part of the Arkansas Valley Interurban RR.

http://ktwu.washburn.edu/journeys/scripts/2003/1602b.html

(Someone needs to find an online collection of historic railroad maps so we can see what was built when!)

FWIW, the Halstead line opened in late 1911 and was torn up for scrap during WW2.

Interesting comment. That new alignment that you were referring to has a through truss bridge over this river.

This is an old Santa Fe RR line according to this 1977 map:

http://www.ksdot.org/burtransplan/maps/HistoricCountyTWP/harveyCoTWP.PDF

It appears that a five mile section of the Santa Fe was moved a few blocks north to avoid passing through Halstead. This bridge was on the old alignment.

I just looked at the latest satelite imagery from this bridge. It is almost certainly a closed-spandrel. It has deteriorated so badly that you can see the inside of the bridge from the air.

The shadow makes me think that this bridge might be a slab, yet there is a repeating pattern on the south side that almost appears to be a series of pony trusses.

Interesting. Historic Imagery doesn't show a road as far back as 1991 so we can assume its been closed since before 1991. I'm not seeing any truss structure in the shadows so I'm thinking (guessing) some sort of concrete slab or like a pony truss?

I discovered this bridge on Google Maps and Terraserver. I can not tell how long it has been here, what it carried originally, or even what design it might be. Have a look at Google Maps and see what you think.