Does that plaque in photo 7 say 1908?
If you are just joining us...
your eyes are not fooling you, yes that really is an 8 span Marsh Arch bridge in the background.
In other words, this crossing features a massive Marsh Arch and a massive railroad bridge. Neither of these bridges would have been cheap to build. Nothing low budget here. Clearly, this was a major travel corridor in decades past.
Thanks for adding more information. This is a heavy bridge, but I am not sure if the truss was built here, or if it was moved here at some point. I first learned of the bridge in 1999, while visiting the nearby John Mack Bridge.
I've seen several heavy, subdivided Warren trusses that the Rock Island has built, but this bridge takes the cake. It looks like it was meant to hold up a couple of UP Big Boy locomotives in the middle of an earthquake! Wow!
They probably replaced the timber approaches and the main stone or concrete piers with H-piles at that time, but there is no way the timbers underneath the main span were replaced then. Those have been cut down for a very, very long time, whenever the old wooden trestle over the river was replaced by a truss, possibly even the current bridge.
In the mid 90s the bride caught fire. the pilings were replaced at that time.
It appears that under this bridge and the approaches that there is chopped off wood under it. it looks like there was a wooden trestle here at one time and this bridge replaced it.
08 or 09 from what I can see.