Nostalgia & History > Gliding over the Feather River

I used to love waiting at this bridge just east of Oroville, Ca. for westbound trains early in the morning.

Adam

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Great picture! I never could figure out how to get to a location to photograph this bridge.

Don Bowen
Saint Helena, CA

Were those pier stubs put in when the line
was built to allow a second track someday?

timz2 Wrote:
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> Were those pier stubs put in when the line
> was built to allow a second track someday?


It looks like the stubs are from the old alignment of the bridge. If you look closely at the alignment, the pier stubs go under the new bridge. This means no possible way a second track could be added.


Cass Telles
"Slow-Approach-Slow" - 'Go by way of the B&O'
Railroads of NW Ohio
http://www.trainweb.org/rrnwoh
My photostream on Flickr - http://www.flickr.com/photos/ctelles/

The bridge the train is on isn't the circa-1960
bridge? Why did they need to replace it?

SlwApprSlw Wrote:
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> It looks like the stubs are from the old alignment
> of the bridge. If you look closely at the
> alignment, the pier stubs go under the new bridge.
> This means no possible way a second track could be
> added.

I agree that it looks in the picture like the stubs go under the bridge. But after finding this in Google Earth, I'm thinking that that must be an optical illusion. On GE you can see a set of 8 stubs on the N side of the existing bridge, that would look much like the stubs in the picture. It looks from the GE view that the alignment had been built (for totally unkonwn reasons) to be expanded to double track, with landings and pier stubs for a second track on the north side of the existing one.

Why this crossing would have been built to be expandable to double track when everything around it is single track for as far as the eye can see is curious. Someone doing the traffic projections must have had some interesting data that doesn't seem to be reflected in any of the other infrastructure in the area.

The stub piers may be protection for the main piers to prevent ice flows from directly impacting the bridge supports. The alignment of the stub piers directly upstream from the bridge piers at least suggests that possibility.

A website concerning the 1957 line relocation for the Oroville Dam says the additional piers were installed to allow a future double tracking. The main bridge piers and the extra piers share a common foundation. Since the water in that location is up to 110 feet deep(!), building a second pier on a common foundation before the pool was flooded would have been relatively easy compared to trying to build a second bridge later in with that water depth. I suppose that since the dam project was footing the bill, why not.

http://www.wplives.com/frc/oroville_line_change.html