This should rekindle some memories:
The New York Central swing bridge is still in place at the mouth of the Cuyahoga. That bridge must have been a real bottleneck. It was a gantlet track so effectively, the whole NYC main was down to one track here. The ‘new’ (present day) double track lift bridge is nearing completion here in 1956.
Here’s another view looking from the north side:
NYC_1956-swing-bridge by Edmund, on Flickr
At 3:26 you catch a very quick glimpse of an NYC Aerotrain car sitting at the Cleveland Union Terminal coach yard car shop. Perhaps the car had wheel problems and was removed from the train? There was a wheel lathe at the small coach repair shed at C.U.T.
Regards, Ed
Swing bridges are hazards to navigation by definition. On the Calumet River, one was removed after being hit by a foreign freighter and the other two (NKP and EJ&E) were replaced by vertical lift bridges.
What planners think people want and what people actually want sometimes are not one and the same.
This might be a more historic picture than that. GM did extensive work to fix the ride problems, and there are sources that claim they did – the improvements were incorporated into a ‘tenth car’ which was then incorporated into one of the sets for road-testing but it was ‘too late by then’ for a variety of reasons.
This might be that car, and if the suspension is clearly visible it might tell us about the nature of GM’s “improvement” or whether it was likely to work as promoted…
At 5:29 there are a couple of views of the B&O’s Bridge 460 and the tower that the Train Order/Bridge Operator used. I worked Bridge 460 for a week or so in the summer of 1968.
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