Bridal Veil Railroad Bridge

This may surprise some of you, but not every weird project I have a go at turns out to be a winner. Some years ago, I did a series on old historic Columbia River Highway bridges, which was fun because they were all a little different, and the engineers who designed them had gone the extra mile to show off what was possible with modern concrete technology, where "modern" meant roughly 1914-1920. So I eventually ran out of those, or more to the point, I hit the long tail part where the remaining items on the list are either small and not very interesting, or far away and hard to visit, or often both. It occurred to me at some point that instead of driving for hours on end, further and further east out into the desert wastes, there was a whole second set of old bridges through the Gorge, used by the Union Pacific railroad that often ran right next to the old highway, and by and large they're at least as old as the highway ones, and it ought to be fairly straightforward to go see a bunch of them and then share some fair-to-middlin' photos and whatever fun trivia I can dig up. That formula usually works out ok; the problem this time around is that there seems to be precisely one interesting train bridge on the Oregon side of the Gorge, the Tanner Creek Viaduct, the big sorta-Roman-aqueduct structure next to Bonneville Dam, and we already visited it way back in 2014. The others fall into two basic categories: Rivers and larger creeks get a steel through truss bridge, like the one on the Sandy River (visited way back in 2009), and anything smaller gets a simple steel beam or girder design, like the one at Multnomah Falls, but without the vintage sign giving mileages by train to various semi-distant cities.

The bridge you see in the photos above is one of the latter category. This is the old railroad bridge at Bridal Veil, downstream of the falls and the trail and next to the site of the old Bridal Veil Lumber sawmill. What little info I know about it comes from a terse database entry in the Federal Railroad Administration's "Railroad Bridges" ArcGIS layer, which informs us this is a "Steel Through Plate Girder" bridge, it crosses over water, is "fixed - non-moveable" (as in not a drawbridge or something), carries one set of tracks, length is not specified, and has a UniqueID code of "W712_OR24695", whatever that means. And that may be all the info Uncle Sam knows about it. I think the db essentially has whatever info the railroad feels like sharing voluntarily, so no details about stuff like the last time a bridge built sometime around 1907 was inspected for rust and structural soundness and whatnot. And I'll just point you at the Steel Bridge and Portsmouth Cut posts if you want to know how things go when your city depends on railroad-owned critical infrastructure and they don't have to tell you anything if they don't want to. The state government knows how little leverage it has, which explains things like a state Fish & Wildlife map of Fish Passage Barriers, which flags every last tiny creek, stream, and seasonal rivulet as a potential fish barrier where it passes under I-84 or the old highway, but not where it passes under the railroad, like they know they can't do anything about that particular barrier and would rather not poke the bear if they can avoid it.

I did find a railfan page that briefly explains what a "Steel Through Plate Girder" bridge is and how it works. See those railings along the length of the bridge? They aren't a safety feature for derailments, and they aren't a pedestrian feature from the old days when passenger trains stopped here. No, those heavy duty "railings" are actually the main load-bearing structure of the bridge: Each girder has a post on each end that attaches it to the concrete bridge piers, and then the bridge deck is attached to the beams, and then the bridge deck is a relatively thin layer attached to the bases of the two girders. The page notes the main reason you might use this design is if you don't have a lot of clearance between track level and whatever it is your bridge needs to cross, which is certainly the case here. Listed along with that are several limitations: "Easy to damage", "Difficult to replace", and "Limited to one track between girders (two possible with depth increase)".

Those design concerns may also explain why I don't think I've ever seen a regular motor vehicle bridge of this design. For one thing, a road bridge is bound to have the occasional vehicle banging into the railing for any number of reasons, and it sounds like this could be rather consequential, both for the bridge and the driver, since these support girders probably don't have the same degree of give on impact that a regular highway guardrail would. And with a road bridge you can usually get around any clearance issues by just building the bridge higher up and putting a ramp at either end, which you can't really do with trains.

Anyway, those bridge design concerns probably explain why the line is single track over the bridge, but is double track for about a mile immediately east of the bridge, ending somewhere around Old Boneyard Road. This was probably done to accomodate freight trains that used to stop at the lumber mill that used to exist here, and the railroad still keeps Bridal Veil on the books as an official train station. This is per federal GIS data, again, which says the station's unique station ID is "UP06258853437", though before anyone gets excited about this, note there is no actual freight or passenger infrastructure in place. Maybe they do this on the off chance the Columbia Gorge timber industry stages a big comeback, or there's a huge boom in the mailing of wedding invitations from the tiny Bridal Veil post office here, or the Oregon side of the Gorge gets passenger rail service again, or who knows.