I wandered onto wikipedia and found on the page for the Alaska RR they showed a picture of tracks and a steam engine crossing a frozen river prior to the completion of a bridge. Has this happened in other places?
Must have been thick ice… look at the show Ice Road Truckers, where they have truckers in northern canada going over ice roads. I can tell you the truckers are definitely speed restricted on the ice and the vibration from their diesel engines is also a problem on the ice.
Back in the day I’m guessing you may have been able to get a light steam engine going slowly over the ice, but modern trains considering how much heavier they are and how diesels produce a lot more vibration than steam did probably not.
I have read that trains ran on tracks laid on the frozen Missouri between Omaha and Council Bluffs before any bridges were built.
Can’t totally believe everything you read in wikipedia, but:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Union_Pacific_Missouri_River_Bridge
then there is this one:
http://www.allworldwars.com/Ice-Railway-Bridge-Over-The-Dnieper-by-Ludwig-Schmeller.html
Looks like more work than just building a real bridge!
I have heard of that being done to get trains across a waterway ahead of the completion of the bridge. There may be several historical instances of running on the ice. What I vaguely recall was a crossing of the Missouri River, but I don’t offhand recall the railroad.
I have also heard stories of logging railroads running over the frozen ice. I was told that Many Point Lake in northern Minnesota has a log train sitting on the bottom with the track underneath it. The log train was reportedly was running on temporary track over the ice, and broke through.
It seems like a unique need must exist in order to go to the work of laying track and running trains over the ice just while the ice persists.
Yes, and between Bismarck and Mandan on the same river and, I’ll bet, in lots of other places on less-considerable streams.
It was done crossing the St.Lawrence River in Montreal prior to construction of the Victoria Bridge in 1860. The crossing was at a slow moving part of the river where the ice would get thick enough, and I understand very long timbers were used as ties. Equipment of that era was very much lighter than anything we are familiar with today. Call it part of trial and error as a brand new technology (railroads) evolved. Realistically it was not a very satisfactory solution that quickly ended.
I can’t recall how the two steam locomotives were transported to a remote logging railroad in northern Maine. They are still there, abandoned, and I think Trains Magazine did an article about them several decades ago. It may have been easier to drag them across ice than build a boat on the lakes with the capacity to carry them.
John
I have a couple of books on the Trans-Siberian railway in my library. It seems that they couldn’t build the line around the southern edge of Lake Baikal right away-too rough- so they used ferrys. When the lake would freeze up, they would build tracks across the frozen lake. When they fough their war against Japan in 1905, they had to get troops and equipment across so again, they built across the water. Lake Bailkal, by the way, is about a mile deep.
Russian equipment was smaller and of a broader gauge, so that may not have caused as much vibration as in Alaska.
During the World War II German seige of Leningrad the Russians built a railway across Lake Ladoga when it froze.
PRR@ Harrisburg crossing the Susquehanna before Rockvile bridge.
Picture of Northern Pacific train crossing the Missouri River on tracks over the ice near Bismarck, North Dakota, March 1879
Predecessor of the MILW Road crossed the Mississippi River at LaCrosse, WI before the bridge was built.
PRR’s former Philadelphia Baltimore and Washington did this during the 18-whichies between Perryville and Havre de Grace MD beforre the bridge was built. The usual ferries couldn’t handle the ice on the Susquehanna’s outlet to Chesapeake Bay. Shoe-flys (or is it shoo flys?) were the order of the day back then and last until today when a railroad has a washout. The one at Perryville must have been kind of simple and I guess H de G’s was pretty level too, before the high level bridges that serve the NEC today.
Think of the human effort that went into these temporary but vital projects. Horses, sleds, rope and funky flannell coats that weighed like a ton when wet. Reminds me of “McCabe and Mrs. Miller”.
Like we say at work, when a customer is pleased, “it’s what we do!!!”.
By the way, how do you pronounce Havre de Grace.? My French (mom is a WW2 bride) side would say “Hav(r) de grass” but I can’t find a definitive pronunciation, even among natives. It’s like detroit and DEtroit or Burt LANcaster and Lancastr PA…
Thinking I’m off on a tangent and going back to sleep, I remain, Rixflix
cx500:
“It was done crossing the St.Lawrence River in Montreal prior to construction of the Victoria Bridge in 1860. The crossing was at a slow moving part of the river where the ice would get thick enough, and I understand very long timbers were used as ties.”
There is a picture in “The American Railway” (one of my favorite books) that is copyrighted 1988 and is a reprint of one from about 100 years earlier, that may be the “ice bridge” you’re talking about. I was going to post a scan of it, but I was a bit concerned about copyright rules. There was no mention of it in text, just an illustration with caption. It looked like they laid long logs on the ice pependicular to the track, then long timbers on top, parallel to the tracks, then the ties and rails on top of that. If I can get an opinion from moderator, I can post it, with credits.
According to the Davenport Democrat, the first locomotive in Iowa, the John A. Dix, was brought over to Davenport from Rock Island on the Mississippi ice. I don’t think this is what you meant because in this case they used skids, and presumably the locomotive wasn’t fired up.
I guess this was do-able back in the early days of railroading when the locomotives and rolling stock were much lighter…imagine trying that with a 15,000 ton coal train!
As stated, I believe tracks across iced-over water bodies were used mainly when said ice prevented ferries or steamboats from operating. That of course leaves us with the problem of what to do when the ice is too thick for boats but too thin for tracks ?? Wait a few weeks until it turns all the way into either water or ice, depending on the season, I suppose.
I’ve always heard “Havre de Grace” prounounced something like “Have-err dee Grace” with the long ‘a’, like Grace Kelly or ‘race car’. I spent a fair amount of time on construction projects just south of there at Perryman (about 3.5 miles southwest of Aberdeen) and Aberdeen in the 1976 and 1982 - 1985 time frames. Of course, that doesn’t mean it’s right or accepted locally - but no one ever laughed at me or told me I was wrong, either, and some of those people had absolutely no reservations about doing that for other things !
- Paul North.
I can confirm the legends of rails laid across the ice at Perryville/Havre de Grace, but not Harrisburg–two bridges north of Harrisburg were constructed by both the PRR and Northern Central when the rail lines were built 1849-50. In Maryland, the cars were towed across the ice with horses on temporary track.
Pronunciation: “HAH-ver-dee-grace” with emphasis on the first syllable and the other three in a quick monotone after that with an ever-so-slight emphasis on the last, with “grace” pronounced like Grace Kelly or “Amazing Grace”.
Maine.
Here is a link to the picture I mentioned about the St. Lawrence crossing on ice. I’m new to flicker, so I hope the link works OK.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/paulofcov/5402670708/
The picture is a bit rough becauseof interference patterns between the engraving and the scanner. This is from the book, “The American Railway” copyright 1988 by Castle.