ASB bridge

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Coordinates: 39 ° 7 ′ 0 ″  N , 94 ° 34 ′ 47 ″  W.

ASB bridge
ASB bridge
The
ASB Bridge 2006, now only used as a railway bridge , behind it the Heart of America Bridge
use Railway bridge
Crossing of Missouri River
place North Kansas City and Kansas City , Missouri
Entertained by BNSF Railway
construction Truss bridge with lift bridge
overall length 391 m (street level 1244 m)
width 11 m (street level 23 m)
Longest span 130 m
Clear height 20 m ( HQ , lift bridge open)
building-costs $ 2.5 million
start of building 1909
opening December 28, 1911
planner Waddell & Harrington
closure 1987 (street level)
location
ASB Bridge (USA)
ASB bridge
Kansas City satellite map (cut) ASB-Bridge.jpg
The ASB Bridge Red circle thick.svg in the Kansas City metropolitan area
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The ASB Bridge (abbreviation for Armor-Swift-Burlington Bridge ) is a single-track railroad bridge over the Missouri River between North Kansas City and Kansas City , Missouri . It was designed by JAL Waddell and built jointly by Armor & Company , Swift & Company and the Chicago, Burlington and Quincy Railroad until 1911 . The truss bridge with lift bridge was a double-decker bridge with a four-lane street level in the upper area and a double-track railway level in the lower area. It was the first road connection over the Missouri in Kansas City and led the Missouri Route 9 until the opening of the neighboring Heart of America Bridge in 1987 . The street level also had two tram tracks from an Interurban until 1948 , but their operation was discontinued in 1933. The street level was demolished by the end of the 1980s and the originally double-track railway level in the lower area now only has one track of the BNSF Railway , which operates the bridge. A special feature of the integrated lifting bridge is the telescopic retraction of the stud frame , which made it possible to raise the railway level without interrupting road traffic.

history

First unfinished bridge in 1890

JAL Waddell created three designs for the
ASB Bridge between 1887 and 1909

At the end of the 19th century, businessman Willard E. Winner wanted to develop the southern part of Clay County bordering Kansas City into a city with an industrial area and residential areas. In the north, the urban area of ​​Kansas City was bounded by the Missouri River and although the Hannibal Bridge was the first railroad bridge ever built over the Missouri in 1869, which could also be used by pedestrians and wagons between the trains , there was in Kansas City so far no road connection across the river. After the Chouteau Bridge opened in 1887, Congress approved the construction of another railroad bridge in Kansas City that same year, subject to the condition that it could be used by vehicles and pedestrians at the same time. The bridge construction engineer John Alexander Low Waddell was hired for the construction (the documents in the Historic American Engineering Record provide different information about the client and original rights holder for the construction project ), who designed a high, single-track railway bridge with outer lanes for vehicles and pedestrians according to the specifications. After the completion of nine bridge piers in 1890, the project had to be abandoned, however, because further funding failed with the onset of the second phase of the Great Depression from 1873-1896 . Winner then acquired control of the unfinished bridge with the Kansas City Bridge and Terminal Railway Company and in 1894 had Waddell modified plans for a low bridge with a lift bridge , but these were never implemented. With the bankruptcy of Winner's companies in 1901, he lost his rights to the properties in Clay County and the bridge, but his plans laid the foundation for the development of what would later become North Kansas City . In 1903 the Union Depot, Bridge, and Terminal Railway Company acquired the rights, a company jointly established by Armor & Company , Swift & Company and Chicago, Burlington and Quincy Railroad (CB&Q), whose shareholders later gave the future Armor-Swift its name -Burlington Bridge (short ASB Bridge ).

Double deck bridge in 1911

The engineer JAL Waddell was hired again in 1907 for a design for the completion of Winners Bridge, this time by the President of the Union Depot, Bridge, and Terminal Railway Company , FW Fratt, who temporarily gave the bridge its name ( Fratt Bridge ). Waddell, who in the meantime had erected the South Halsted Street Lift Bridge in Chicago , designed a new double-decker bridge with an integrated lift bridge based on his old designs . This provided for two tracks for the CB&Q on the lower level as well as two tram tracks in the middle area of ​​the level above, which also had a lane with a closed footpath on the outside. A special feature of the lift bridge was to be the telescopic retraction of the stud frame , which made it possible to raise the railway level without interrupting road traffic. The old bridge piers from 1890 were to be shortened and, with a few exceptions, integrated into the new bridge. Since his then engineering office Waddell & Harrington could not fully convince the client of the feasibility of the lift bridge, he had an electrically operated, detailed wooden model made, and after a further assessment of the plans by a commission of experts, construction of the truss bridge began in August 1909 . The construction work could be completed by the end of 1911 and the official opening took place on December 28, 1911. The Kansas City, Clay County and St. Joseph Interurban Railway began operating a streetcar connection over the bridge to North Kansas City in 1913, which existed until 1933; the tram tracks were removed in 1948 as part of a renovation of the street level. Use of the road bridge was subject to tolls until the State Highway Department of Missouri took over the ASB Bridge in 1927 .

Today's railway bridge 1987

The poor condition of the four-lane bridge and the steadily increasing volume of traffic led to plans for the construction of a new separate road bridge at the end of the 1970s. The then Missouri Highway and Transportation Department agreed in 1980 with the Burlington Northern Railroad , in which the CB&Q had merged in 1970, to take over the bridge after an overhaul and the dismantling of the road level including the access roads. The cessation of road traffic and the demolition took place with the opening of the neighboring Heart of America Bridge in 1987, which today has five lanes and has a wide, demarcated cycle and footpath.

The Burlington Northern Railroad merged in 1995 to form the BNSF Railway , which still operates a track over the bridge today. The BNSF has in Kansas City with the Murray Yard ( North Kansas City ) and the Argentine Yard ( Kansas City, Kansas ) two large freight and marshalling yards , inter alia, by tracks on the ASB Bridge and upstream following Hannibal Bridge of 1917 connected. In 1996 the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) added the ASB Bridge to the list of historical milestones in civil engineering .

description

Complete overview

Schematic drawing of the ASB Bridge from 1927 ( HAER MO-2). The upper street level was dismantled at the end of the 1980s and only the three middle trusses over the Missouri, including the lift bridge, are still used for rail traffic by the BNSF Railway ; Kansas City (Missouri) on the left and North Kansas City on the right , given in feet (′) and inches (″), for reasons of illustration the length scale for different sections of the bridge is slightly different.

Until the road level was dismantled in 1987, the ASB Bridge was a double-decker bridge , consisting of the main bridge over the Missouri, which is still in use today, and the entrances to the road level on both sides. The main bridge is made up of three trusses , with an integrated lift bridge on the south side towards Kansas City. The lower 391 m long railway level is designed for two railway tracks, but now only has one. The upper street level had a total length of 1244 m and was built from Trestle bridges on both sides of the main bridge , with an additional truss per side over the railway tracks, and made a slight right turn on the north side towards North Kansas City.

Street level 1911 to 1987

The combined railway and road bridge in 1981, upper road level dismantled from 1987 (view to the NW, above the KC Municipal Airport )

Starting from the abutment (from the left in the drawing above), the southern approach to the street level consisted of two beam girders with a total of 28 m, followed by an 87 m long parallel- chorded truss girder with an underlying carriageway, to which eleven beam girders with a total length of 218 m connected to the main bridge . The steel girders rested here on three of the original masonry stone pillars from 1890 and another ten steel pillars with a concrete foundation. After the 391 m long main bridge, there were 25 beam girders with a total length of 425 m for the northern approach, a 39 m long parallel-belted lattice girder with the carriageway below and five beam girders with a total length of 53 m to the abutment. With the exception of the truss, the northern Trestle Bridge was supported by more than 20 steel pillars, the slope of the road was about 3 percent. Over the entire length of the bridge, two lanes of the 7.3 m wide middle carriageway ran directly on the girder and lattice girders, into which two tram tracks were integrated until the end of the 1940s; the roadway here originally consisted of wooden planks and was later replaced by a reinforced concrete layer. Another 4 m wide carriageway with a stepped footpath ran on 6.8 m long cantilevers on the outside, which had been made of reinforced concrete since the opening in 1911. Due to the more than one meter wide belts of the lattice girders, the roadway was shifted to the outside at the transition from the beam to the lattice girders.

Railway level and lift bridge

Cable system with the counterweights, above one of the two operating houses
BNSF freight train entering the lower level of the lift bridge in 2013; Remnants of the former cantilever beams for the street level can still be seen in the upper area

The railway level only runs over the main bridge. This consists of three approximately 130 m long lattice girders with parallel chords , designed as a stud framework with additional posts and additional longitudinal and transverse struts in the lower area, which were customary for railway bridges of the time, whereby the framework fields are again divided and reinforced (Baltimore truss) . The two northern girders lead the track level at the level of the lower chords . The adjoining girder with lifting bridge is offset in height by about 18 m so that its lower chords are level with the upper chords of the other two girders. The platform level of the lift bridge is located below the lower chords - which here have a cross section of 1.5 m × 1.3 m - and can be lowered into the posts of the truss by means of a special telescopic rail guide to the level of the lower chords of the northern girders. When the 26 hangers are fully drawn in (cross-section approx. 40 cm × 40 cm), the clear height below the bridge is around 20 m during high water . The three trusses rest on four of the original stone pillars from 1890, which at that time were lowered in the river bed by means of caissons to the bedrock at a depth of about 15 m and later shortened. The weight of the steel - the superstructure is around 11,700 tonnes, with about 3650 per tonne to the northern truss omitted and 4400 t to the lifting bridge, including the steel components of the drive system.

The lift bridge is moved using a cable pull system. The hangers and ends of the track level are connected to the outside of the steel structure by steel cables over a large number of pulleys with 4 × 8 concrete counterweights. The steel ropes converge at the ends of the upper chords and are guided over two outer corrugated gears that are connected to an electric motor . The cable pulls are only moved by the prevailing friction between the corrugated wheels and cables, for which the moving part (weight approx. 730 t) is balanced with its counterweights. The motors, which are also coupled via a cable system, are located in the respective operating houses on the trusses and are dimensioned so that if one motor fails, the lift bridge can be operated independently by the other.

Web links

Commons : ASB Bridge  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Willard E. Winner. Men Who Made Kansas City, VintageKansasCity.com. Retrieved August 11, 2018.
  2. ^ Cydney E. Millstein: Francois Chouteau Bridge. Historic American Engineering Record, HAER No. MO-93, Denver, Colorado, 1991.
  3. ^ Clayton B. Fraser: ASB Bridge. Historic American Engineering Record, Missouri Historic Bridge Inventory, Washington, DC 1994 (Fraser heads the Chicago, Kansas City and Texas Railway as the original owner and replaces the Kansas City and Atlantic Railroad ); Jean P. Yearby: Armor, Swift, Burlington Bridge (ASB). Historic American Engineering Record, HAER No. MO-2, Denver, Colorado, 1984, p. 4 (Yearby names the Wabash, St. Louis, and Pacific Railroad Company as the owner ); JAL Waddell does not provide any information about the original client in its publications of 1898 and 1916.
  4. JAL Waddell: De Pontibus: A Pocket Book for Bridge Engineers. John Wiley & Sons, New York 1898, pp. 114-118.
  5. ^ Architectural and Art Historical Research: An Architectural / Historic Survey of the City of North Kansas City, Missouri. City of North Kansas City, Missouri, February 1996, pp. 4-7.
  6. ^ Jean P. Yearby: Armor, Swift, Burlington Bridge (ASB). Historic American Engineering Record, HAER No. MO-2, Denver, Colorado, 1984, pp. 4 f.
  7. ^ JAL Waddell: Bridge Engineering. John Wiley & Sons, New York 1916, pp. 723-728.
  8. ^ Kansas City, Clay County and St. Joseph Interurban Railway. Interurbanroad.com, accessed August 12, 2018.
  9. ^ A b Clayton B. Fraser: ASB Bridge. Historic American Engineering Record, Missouri Historic Bridge Inventory, Washington, DC 1994.
  10. ^ Jean P. Yearby: Armor, Swift, Burlington Bridge (ASB). Historic American Engineering Record, HAER No. MO-2, Denver, Colorado, 1984, pp. 5 f.
  11. ^ Jean P. Yearby: Armor, Swift, Burlington Bridge (ASB). Historic American Engineering Record, HAER No. MO-2, Denver, Colorado, 1984, pp. 2 et al. 5 f.
  12. Michael Rhodes: North American Railyards. MBI Publishing, 2003, ISBN 0-7603-1578-7 , pp. 24-29.
  13. ^ Jean P. Yearby: Armor, Swift, Burlington Bridge (ASB). Historic American Engineering Record, HAER No. MO-2, Denver, Colorado, 1984, pp. 11 f.
  14. ^ A b C. W. Yelm, Leon Clarke: The Fratt Bridge Over the Missouri River at Kansas City, MO. In: The Purdue Engineering Review. No. 8, 1912, pp. 44-55, here pp. 44-47.
  15. ^ Glenn A. Knoblock: Historic Iron and Steel Bridges in Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont. McFarland, Jefferson 2012, ISBN 978-0-7864-4843-2 , pp. 36 f.
  16. ^ Waddell & Harrington, Consulting Engineers: Photocopy of drawing (original drawing no. 45) LIFT DEC - END OR CHORD, LOWER CHORD PANEL & HANGAR - Armor, Swift, Burlington Bridge, Kansas City, Jackson County, MO. Historic American Engineering Record, HAER MO-2, 48-KANCI, 16-54, 1982.
  17. ^ A b Jean P. Yearby: Armor, Swift, Burlington Bridge (ASB). Historic American Engineering Record, HAER No. MO-2, Denver, Colorado, 1984, pp. 9-11.
  18. ^ CW Yelm, Leon Clarke: The Fratt Bridge Over the Missouri River at Kansas City, MO. In: The Purdue Engineering Review. No. 8, 1912, pp. 44-55, here pp. 48-55.
This article was added to the list of articles worth reading on August 27, 2018 in this version .