Cliff Darby

The Black / Ouachita river is navigable, and this bridge isn't terribly far upstream from that body of water. My supposition is agricultural needs in the area supported barge traffic, necessitating a movable span.

The Southern Pacific railroad merged with the Union Pacific railroad in the mid 1990s; I've adjusted the description of the bridge to reflect this. However, I left the name as the SP bridge to reflect the name by which it might be more commonly referred.

Sure would be nice if they'd finish the Interstate we already have (I-49 to New Orleans) before they start working on another one! I'm pretty sure I'll go to my grave before they build the Lafayette Connector. I'm 32.

Street View definitely shows a crew removing the deck from the old bridge. No doubt its getting dismantled :(

Such a shame we've lost almost all of our K-Truss bridges.

I sure hope they don't remove the truss. Seems awful wasteful to erect a trail setup with parking, etc, just to tear it down. From the news article, it sounds like the wooden trestle is what's hurting the water flow during floods, by collecting debris.

One lane of the bridge is “open” in that the dirt pile doesn’t totally block the bridge. I wasn’t able to explore around the bridge as a hunter was parked in front of it, and I didn’t wanna get shot!

Always interesting to see bridges which are both "Swing" and "Vertical Lift"... there's one up in Arkansas that was changed due to the river channel shifting.

Thank you for all of these contributions, Brian! Interesting to imagine a movable span at this location. Back then the area was buzzing with the logging industry, and I can see how bold innovators imagined making the Little River navigable to the Black and Mississippi rivers.

Another great photo, Brian! When / who removed the bridges here and at Archie?

Great photos, Brian! Thank you so much for sharing.

It appears the old US 71 continued on this alignment and crossed the next creek at a now-lost bridge.

Bridge doesn’t appear to be open to traffic. There are street signs indicating “bridge out” and satellite view shows the bridge left in the open position.

The newly posted photo looks like the Fulton Street bridge not the Moncla Bridge.

Awful lot of money spent on repeatedly updating that stretch of highway, that’s for sure.