Saturday, September 27, 2014

BNSF Columbia Slough Bridge


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The next Columbia Slough bridge on the agenda is the one carrying the BNSF railroad. This is the same rail line that crosses the Columbia on the Vancouver & Oregon Slough railroad bridges, and continues on through the Portsmouth Cut (beneath a set of railroad-owned road bridges), and then across the Willamette on Bridge 5.1. Like all of the aforementioned bridges, the one over the slough was designed by Ralph Modjeski (who also designed downtown Portland's Broadway Bridge).

This is the smallest and undoubtedly the least interesting of the BNSF Modjeski bridges. Frankly there's nothing interesting about it other than who designed it, and it's hard to imagine that he actually spent a lot of time on this one. There wasn't even anything in the Oregonian database about it, as far as I can tell. But one of the constant guiding principles at this humble blog is that some things are worth doing just for the sake of completeness, and this bridge completes the set of Portland Modjeski bridges. As far as I know. One upside of this sake-of-completeness thing is that I end up having a top search ranking for all sorts of curious and obscure things. Which would be great, if anyone was ever bored enough to actually Google them.

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