Oneonta Creek Railroad Bridge

So next we've got some photos of the train bridge at Oneonta Creek, continuing east on this little speedrun. We visited the ones at Bridal Veil and Wahkeena Creek in the previous two posts, and saw the one at Multnomah Falls back in 2018, so I guess this one is the logical next step. Federal railroad GIS says this one has a unique ID of "W925_OR24624", if that means anything to you, and lists the bridge design type as "Regular Steel Beams/Girder + Misc. Steel bridges", which I don't think is exactly a technical engineering term. You can see that this one is supported by a steel beam or girder underneath the bridge instead of two on the sides, and you can also see that it has substantially more clearance above the creek than the Bridal Veil one does, so the designers didn't have the same design constraints as the Bridal Veil bridge.

This one also sits just downstream of the two HCRH road bridges, which brings us to the one and only mildly unusual detail I have about this one. Before civil engineers got their hands on it, the Columbia River once ran fairly close to the bluffs at Oneonta Creek, close enough that at one spot just east of the creek the railroad took up all the usable space between the river and the cliff. A few decades later, when the Columbia River Highway got here, the railroad wouldn't budge and highway engineers ended up having to dig the Oneonta Tunnel to continue the road east from there. Eventually the state decided to build a river-level road to replace the winding and twisting old highway, which involved quarrying vast quantities of gravel and filling in some areas along the river where there was no existing flat land available. Once that had happened through here -- on the taxpayer dime -- the railroad was suddenly much more amenable to moving, and in 1948 a sort of switcheroo was arranged: New, rerouted tracks were built, and then the existing bridge was somehow moved sideways to the current bridge location, and train traffic was shifted over to there. Then a new stretch of road was built where the train used to run, complete with a shiny new modern bridge. And when that was finished, they shifted traffic to the new road around the cliff, blocked off the Oneonta Tunnel, and used the original 1914 highway bridge for parking.

That last detail actually resolved another problem with the original alignment, which was that there was nowhere to park if you wanted to stop and wade up Oneonta Gorge. As a 1946 doc explains, the state ended up leasing a bit of railroad land for a parking lot and grandly declared that little area to be a new state park, which then quietly fell off the rolls after the realignment.

The switcheroo details come from February 2000 nomination designating parts of the highway of as a "National Historic Landmark", which I gather is similar to the National Register of Historic Places but with stricter rules on how intact a thing has to be, such that the whole road qualified for the National Register, but only certain parts were good enough to be a Landmark. The doc went on to explain that the 1948 road bridge here was a "non-contributing structure", but its presence was not enough to derail the whole nomination since the original bridge was bypassed and left in place instead of being removed. So that's nice, I guess.