Sandy River Railroad Bridge

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Believe it or not, the ongoing bridge project takes us out to Troutdale, to the rusty old railroad bridge over the Sandy River. Seriously, this whole post is about that bridge -- although fortunately it's not a very big post. This is what you get when you're willing to do trivial and uninteresting stuff purely for the sake of completeness.

It's a short post because there isn't much to say about it. There's a Bridgehunter page about it, which tells us the bridge dates to 1906. The City of Troutdale's history page says the shiny new transcontinental railroad arrived earlier, in November 1882 (a really big deal at the time, as you might imagine), so there must've been an earlier bridge on the site. I've never seen any photos of that original bridge, not that I've looked very hard. Ok, at all, quite honestly. But just speculating wildly I'd guess it was probably some kind of old growth wood trestle of some sort, it just stands to reason.



Elsewhere on the interwebs, here are a couple of nice photos of the bridge. And a page on Pixelmap mentions, but has no photos of, the bridge -- although it does have some of various other bridges in the area, so I figured I'd pass it along, I mean, if you're already as bored with the thing as I am.



It's fortunate that the rules (such as they are) only call for a visit, an attempt to walk the thing if it's not a railroad or freeway bridge, a batch of photos, and a post about the, uh, adventure. The rules don't specify that the post has to be of any minimum length, nor do they specify that the photos need to be interesting or numerous, and they certainly don't require me to act enthusiastic about the whole thing. In this particular case, I was on my way somewhere else and thought I'd take a couple of minutes to stop for a couple of photos. So I did, and then I continued on my way, end of adventure. Yay, adventures. Or whatever.