http://i220.photobucket.com/albums/dd51/Hwolf_photos/Best%20of%20Wolfcreek/IMG_2567.jpg
I would like to know if there was ever a time that a Plate Girder Bridge was supported by WOOD BENTS. In the link above the Plate Girders (1 Full Span & 2 Half Spans) are going under the track closest to the back.As you can see it is a fairly great opening and the Trestle is in front. I would like to keep that look if posible but would not like to be totally wrong with the bents.
Here is a picture I took in Nova Scotia over the summer. Most of the rail lines there have been abandoned, except the North-South line from Halifax to Montreal. The tracks leading to this string of bridges were gone, too, but the bridges are still standing for some reason.
The plate girder and truss bridges are resting on stone piers, but the approach track is on a wood trestle. I thought the combination of construction methods was interesting enough to take a picture of.
On temporary trackage that has to carry heavy traffic it is not uncommon to have wood piers under the ends of girders - but the piers are not very similar to trestle bents. There would be bigger pilings, in a double row (where trestles are single) and the cap would be a substantial structure incorporating longitudinal as well as transverse timbers. The result is more masonry pier in timber than trestle bent.
I saw this on a shoo-fly (temporary thoroughfare track) around a site where an old multi-span single track deck girder bridge was being replaced with a double-track ballasted deck semi-cantilever (much longer spans, abutments out of the river.) Since the alternate routes were, to put it mildly, circuitous, rerouting the 100-odd scheduled trains that used that line each day was not an option.
(Why not just build a trestle with no girder spans? If you had seen the river, you wouldn’t ask!)
Chuck (Modeling Central Japan in September, 1964 - with a shoo-fly under construction)
I didn’t want to take away from the front trestle. I thought that a small amount of bents would not ruin the effect.
I have seen several of them on the SP and CNW.
Yes, there are quite a few examples out here in California on former Southern Pacific lines (now UP). In fact, two major crossings over the American River here in Sacramento on both the UP former Southern Pacific and Western Pacific lines have extensive wood trestle-work leading to steel bridge crossings (though the ex-SP crossing has been replaced by steel and concrete bents due to a major fire some time ago). And there are several still existant examples of wood trestle-steel girder bridgework on the now abandoned SP branch between Lodi, CA and San Andreas in the Central California foothills.
Tom [:)]