Horsetail Creek Railroad Bridge

Next up we've got a few photos of the train bridge at Horsetail Creek, just down the tracks from the Oneonta Creek one we looked at in the last poist, and just downstream from the HCRH Horsetail Creek Bridge, which we visited back in 2018. Federal railroad GIS says this one is like the others we've looked at today in that it carries a single set of tracks and is not a drawbridge or any other kind of moving bridge. Like its neighbor to the west, the ridge type is listed as "Regular Steel Beams/Girder + Misc. Steel bridges", and it has a UniqueID of "W811_OR24818", for whatever that's worth. This one does look different than the Oneonta one and I don't think it's of the exact same design, like it's being held up by multiple smaller steel beams rather than one large girder. Like the others I have no information on how old this bridge might be, and I don't think I could even guess a correct range of a few decades. Regardless of that, the sorta-handrail on this bridge looks like a later addition and may coincide with the advent of modern personal injury law.

I have two mildly interesting and not particularly old items to pass along this time around:

• A 2012 Horsetail Creek floodplain restoration design doc. This project re-engineered the large low-lying area between the old highway and Interstate 84 to make it more friendly to baby salmon, implementing various things from the standard baby salmon playbook, like plenty of woody debris in the water. Regarding that, let me point you at this post from about a year ago -- it's technically about some new-ish salmon-themed art in the South Waterfront area, but while putting the post together I came across various sources indicating we don't actually understand the various needs of baby salmon anywhere near as well as we think we do. Also I think that post is one of my better recent ones, and is probably more entertaining than the one you're reading now. And if you're wondering why I'm mentioning all this stuff, the link to the 2012 plan came up in search results because the bridge here and the one on Oneonta Creek mark part of the boundary of the study area.
• A 2009 Multnomah County planning approval doc for placing power lines underground, explaining how the proposed work complies with all sorts of regulations. A window into what it takes to get anything done when your proposed project is going to take place within both Multnomah County and the federal National Scenic Area. Behold and despair as a maze of agencies endlessly consult and re-consult with each other and struggle to get anything done, even though nobody actually objects to the proposal.