I’m looking for pictures of city skywalks such as used in Des Moines Iowa and Minneapolis Minnesota. I’m wanting to include these on my layout but my memory of those that I’ve seen is over five years old.
I did a local television news feature story some 22 years ago when the third bank in Corpus Christi built a skywalk across an intersection. It seemed like it was the thing a bank needed to do to keep up with the other institutions that had one. I called my story “skywalk one-upmanship.”
I don’t have a picture, but I see the skywalks frequently. One feature I notice is that they have steel trusses with diagonal members INSIDE the structure, usually visible through the glass “wall”. One skybridge runs at a 45 degree angle across an intersection with about 18 feet clearance. It is enclosed with gray-tinted glass walls-- clear glass except for the bottom and top 3 feet or so of the structure, where there is opaque but glossy black glass. Through the windows can be seen the trusswork. It is lighter than a vehicle or railroad bridge because it has to hold only the weight of the structure itself and the pedestrians.
A quick search on Yahoo has produced a whole bunch of photos.
ericboone that’s exactly what I was looking for. There are some great reference photos there. Thanks much
As you may know Union Pacific, formerly Tidewater Southern, used to have tracks running down the middle of 9th Street in Modesto, CA. The former Red Lion Inn (now Radisson) has a skywalk going between the hotel on one side of 9th Street and a parking garage on the other side. I had planned to take a photograph of a train from that skywalk, unfortunately I never did and now the tracks are gone. I wonder how many other skywalks go over tracks.