By this I mean lift bridges that are on active lines that are OOS because the boat traffic has long been gone or never used because ships never got that far. Like the Upper Missouri bridges or the Red River in ND
Why is or was the lift bridge constructed at the W side of the water crossing instead of the middle of the Navigable Channel? It was discussed in a couple of other forums RE: Ghost Lift Bridges. I know of a couple of bridges that were built on the NYC operated once because they were required by coast gaurd to build them because the waterway could be navigated.
We have a variation on this theme in the Chicago area. There are some bascule bridges on the North Branch of the Chicago River that haven’t been raised in years because masted navigation no longer goes that far. On the Sanitary and Ship canal, there are a number of swing bridges and bascule bridges that are no longer movable also due to the lack of masted navigation even though towboat-barge operations continue to use the waterway.
There’s an old bascule bridge here in Richmond Va that hasn’t been opened in decades. It crosses what’s left of the old Kanawha Canal down by Great Ship Lock Park on Dock Street, and it’s part of the Norfolk-Southern West Point Line.
The line was heavily rebuilt several years ago and now the bridge couldn’t be opened even if they wanted to do so. No matter, the canal’s been unused since the 1930’s or so.
Several years ago, Amtrak’s Sunset Limited was derailed when a towboat pushed its barges into a former swing bridge at Big Bayou Canot. The channel had been closed to navigation for fifty years or more. In February, a film crew was hit by a CSX train with fatal results at a Bascule bridge at Doctortown, GA. That bridge spanned a dry (or nearly dry) area that had once been a navigable channel.
Not a lift bridge, but a swing bridge - The Spring Garden bridge over the Patapsco River in Baltimore has become a double ghost. The river is no longer navigable and CSX no longer uses this former Western Maryland route into the area that was formerly the WM’s Port Covington yard.
That " BridgeHunter.com" web site (link posted by BaltACD) is an excellent resource to research old railroad bridges and within it you will find more anomalies concerning old bridges than you can imagine…[:-^]