Photo taken by Aaron Hockley
License: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike (CC BY-NC-SA)
BH Photo #280037
There is an illustration and short mention of this bridge under construction in Harper's Weekly Feb 29, 1896 in an article entitled "How Long and Lofty Bridges are Built" by Frank W. Skinner, C.E.
Great Northern must have had a creative engineer in the 1920s. Both the build dates and rehabilitation dates are similar for this structure and this deck truss in Minnesota:
Definitely ranks at the top of the scale of coolness for me too, and I really like the deck truss span with the polygonal lower chord too!
Extremely unique and unusual structure...I like it too!
I hereby rate this bridge as extreme weirdness. And I like it.
The Great Northern Railway needed a stronger bridge to carry the heavier traffic and locomotives that were being used at the time. Rather than build a temporary bridge while this one was rebuilt, it was decided to build the stronger bridge on the outside of the original bridge. Railroad traffic was never stopped. This is one of the most interesting bridges I've ever seen, especially from a boat underneath. It is strangely handsome, it a brutish sort of way.
Excellent information on the bridge at http://www.bigbendrailroadhistory.com/ (Monday, January 31, 2022) with the original 1975 "National Register of Historic Place- Nomination Form.