Westport Locker Driveway Bridge

Mike, I understand that the wife of a railroad employee who lived nearby saw the bridge burning and went to the track with a lantern and stopped a train headed to the bridge. There was a wye there connecting the Big 4 and Indiana Southern which allowed the detour of the bridge.

This bridge replaces the original bridge built in 1881. That one burned down in Apr 1904 and was replaced with a temporary pile bridge used until the concrete one was built.

That's why I put both a NYC name and a CC&StL/Big 4 name in the alt name section.

And retaining a historic name only really works if and only if they've got a name like "Salisbury Bridge" or the like to transfer over.

An example of bridges where it doesn't really work to keep the original name is the myriad of bridges on the Milwaukee Road & Chicago & North Western systems that John has proven to be relocated.(Seriously, he's found a lot of them.)

Regardless, there should be signage denoting a given span's history, even if the name itself is not transferable.

It doesn't pay homage to an historic bridge to change it's name however.

"Big 4-Millstone Creek Bridge" would at least do that!

I feel the same about bridges that are relocated across county or state lines, if there is a historic name it should go with that bridge and be duly noted in signage at the new location.

The VG&R name was not really a good one as the bridge was built when the CCC&StL owned the line. CCC&StL also used the name Big 4 and Big 4 was used by the railroad for a long time on official documents and on it's head quarters office building. The bridge at Louisville over the Ohio is still called the Big 4 bridge. I would prefer Big 4 or NYC be apart of the name but it should reflect the stream it crosses or at least it's location in Westport.

An entry's name should reflect a bridge's current usage. There's a bridge in Los Angeles that is similar to this bridge. Said bridge was originally part of the Pacific Electric, but is now part of parking lot crossing the Grand Canal.

Which is going to be more useful to someone now looking for either bridge? Certainly not the railroad in these cases, as I'm certain most LA residents can tell you just as much about the PE red cars as the locals adjacent to this bridge can tell you the railroad the name originally used, which from what I've found on Google, was leased to the Big Four immediately after completion and likely never saw a train bearing that name.

Also just my two cents as well.

I prefer to see historic names retained and used instead of coined names like "Westport Locker Bridge".

...My two cents

Search pulls from the title/alt names section, so Big 4/Big Four in the alt names section would suffice for bridges such as this that are still in use/were used well after the route was merged into the NYC.

It was re-titled with a useless string of gibberish so James knows to delete it. :')

Very surprised to see this bridge in use as road bridge to access parking lot. It had set for decades unused and it appears that the bridge which had been access from the road needed replacement and the old railroad span was used to replace it.