Kentucky and Indiana Terminal Bridge

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Coordinates: 38 ° 16'58 "  N , 85 ° 48'6"  W.

Kentucky & Indiana Terminal Bridge
Kentucky & Indiana Terminal Bridge
use Railway bridge
Crossing of Ohio River
place Louisville, Kentucky and
New Albany, Indiana
Entertained by Norfolk Southern Railway
construction Truss bridge with swing bridge
overall length 1218 m
Longest span 188 m
Clear height 30 m
opening 1886, 1912
location
Kentucky and Indiana Terminal Bridge (USA)
Kentucky and Indiana Terminal Bridge
McAlpine Locks and Dam navigation chart (detail) from 2010.jpg
The McAlpine Locks and Dam with the K&I Terminal Bridge (left NumberTwoInCircle.svg) and the Fourteenth Street Bridge (right 6NumberSixInCircle.png)
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The Kentucky & Indiana Terminal Bridge ( K&I Bridge for short ) is a double-track railway bridge over the Ohio between Louisville in Kentucky and New Albany in Indiana . It goes back to one of the first bridges over the Ohio from 1886, which was built here by a consortium of several railroad companies to compete with the Fourteenth Street Bridge (1870) of the Pennsylvania Railroad (PRR) following upstream . The location of both bridges is at the level of the rapids Falls of the Ohio , for the most part in the reservoir of today barrage McAlpine Locks and Dam are, with the K & I Bridge behind the locks and the Fourteenth Street Bridge along the eastern dam runs. With the increase in rail traffic at the beginning of the 20th century, both bridges were replaced by more powerful structures, with the K&I Bridge, like its predecessor, having additional side lanes that were used for road traffic until 1979. The railway bridge was part of the eponymous Kentucky and Indiana Terminal Railroad for almost 100 years , which was incorporated into the Norfolk Southern Railway in 1982 . The Class 1 railroad company now operates it for freight traffic between Louisville and St. Louis .

history

First bridge 1886

The Monon Railroad , which mainly operates in Indiana, wanted to realize its own access to Louisville via the Ohio and thus south to the state of Kentucky with the support of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad and the later Southern Railway . At that time, the railroad companies could only use the PRR's Fourteenth Street Bridge, completed in 1870, for a fee , which was one of only three bridges over the river to Kentucky, which forms the northern border of the state for a length of about 1,000 km. Since the other two bridges were in Cincinnati , 160 km away , the PRR had a dominant position here. To build their own bridge, the railroad companies founded the Kentucky & Indiana Bridge Company in 1880 . The foundation stone was laid at the end of 1881, but after some initial work on the bridge piers, the project came to a standstill due to differences between the companies and could only be continued at the end of 1883. The bridge was finally completed in the summer of 1886. The construction was carried out under the direction of chief engineer John McLeod, based on designs by C. Shaler Smith, Charles Mcdonald and Edward Hemberle, which were based on the principle patented by Heinrich Gottfried Gerber in Germany in 1866 for the superstructure of the tanner wearer. A special feature of the truss bridge was the use of two suspension girders , whereby two openings with spans of 146–147 meters were achieved in the 482 meter long cantilever bridge ; the length of the suspension brackets integrated here was 49 meters each.

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Panoramic picture from 1911 of the first bridge from 1886 with its double tanner girders (right), the progress of the work on the first bridge piers of the new bridge running parallel can be seen on the left.

Since the high water level before the construction of barrages along the Ohio could be more than 20 meters above the low water and the state requirements required a minimum clearance of 12 meters even in extreme floods, the bridge rested on sandstone pillars up to 36 meters high. These were built directly on the bedrock of the river bed, which is here at a shallow depth of about one meter. In order to enable steam ships with their high chimneys to pass through during floods , a 113 m long swing bridge was also integrated on the Indiana side , to which a 75-meter single-span girder in a similar framework construction was attached. For the 748 meter long main bridge over the Ohio, 58% of the new material steel was used in addition to the usual cast and wrought iron , with the total weight of iron and steel being 2,640 tons. The access trestle bridges were originally made of wood, but were replaced by steel structures in 1893. The railway bridge also had a three-meter wide roadway on its outer sides. It was the first road connection across the Ohio above Louisville that could also be used by wagons , as the PRR's older Fourteenth Street Bridge only had one footpath, which enabled the operators of the K&I Bridge to generate additional income. Construction costs amounted in 1886 to 872,900 US dollars .

Second bridge in 1912

Swing bridge of the K&I Bridge from 1912

In addition to the bridge, the Kentucky & Indiana Bridge Company also operated a 6.6 km long interurban between Louisville and New Albany, which was electrified in 1893 as one of the first local railways in the USA . At the beginning of the 20th century, 75 steam-powered freight and long-distance trains and almost 100 electric intercity trams ran over the single-track bridge every 15 minutes. The three railway companies reorganized the operating company as Kentucky and Indiana Terminal Railroad at the turn of the century and were forced to replace the bridge with a double-track bridge with a higher load capacity due to the steadily increasing traffic and the increasingly heavy steam locomotives ; the same applied to the neighboring bridge of the PRR. According to a design by the then liaison engineer James B. Willson, the new bridge was built by Foster & Creighton (substructure) and the American Bridge Company (superstructure) about 13 meters upriver parallel to the old one between 1910 and 1912 . Here truss bridge steel in contrast to the existing cantilever bridge for the new were only single-span beams , used, and these were connected during construction to some in cantilever construction to build. Due to the introduction of steel in bridge construction, largely driven by George S. Morison, and the increasing qualitative improvement of the building material and the framework structures, spans of 188 meters could be achieved for the two largest openings of the new bridge, which was the record for single-span girders at the time. but this was exceeded by the MacArthur Bridge with 204 meters in the year of completion . With the new K&I Bridge, the length of the new swing bridge has also been increased to 122 meters. The old bridge was demolished after the traffic had been relocated to the new structure. Construction costs amounted in 1912 to about 2 million US dollars .

Road bridge and change of ownership in 1982

The outer lanes closed in 1979 with emergency bays

Like its predecessor, the new K&I Bridge had side lanes and was the only road link between Louisville, Kentucky and the smaller towns of New Albany , Clarksville and Jeffersonville in Indiana until the Louisville Municipal Bridge was completed in 1929 . The carriageway deck, which originally consisted of wooden planks, was replaced by gratings in 1952 and the volume of traffic was still high until the opening of the Sherman Minton Bridge following downstream in 1962; the toll income for the operating company is also lucrative. After one of the lanes was damaged in 1979, both were closed and have not been reopened since.

The Kentucky & Indiana Terminal Railroad developed into a local industrial railroad with marshalling yards and depots since the 1910s . In the 1950s, the railway handled 1.3 million freight wagons on its 200 km long route network and employed over 1,000 people. The previously operated Interurban was sold to the Louisville and Northern Railway and Light Company in 1907 . With the increasing expansion of the road network and the emergence of motorized individual transport, more and more freight traffic was shifted to the road and the operating company of the bridge and the industrial railway finally passed into the ownership of the Southern Railway at the end of 1981 , which in turn became part of the Norfolk and Western in the following year Railway merged to form the Norfolk Southern Corporation , which in 1990 became the Norfolk Southern Railway (NS). Today the NS only operates the bridge for freight traffic between Louisville and St. Louis .

The use of the outer carriageway as a pedestrian bridge with a cycle path, which the cities of Louisville and New Albany have been striving for since the beginning of the 21st century, is still rejected by the railway company for safety reasons and has not yet been enforced due to legal hurdles.

description

The bridge is located downstream behind the McAlpine Locks and Dam , with the south side in Kentucky right outside the gates of the barrage is whose predecessors originally part of the built in the 1830s, Louisville and Portland Canal were. The structure with a total length of 1218 m is divided into the six trusses of the main bridge over the Ohio (pillar no. 1-7, 781 m) and the following access roads on the Indiana side (46 m) and the Kentucky side (391 m), which are designed as a railway embankment or trestle bridge , with integrated smaller truss and beam girders. The maximum gradient of the railway area to the center of the bridge is between 9.0 and 12.5 ‰, that of the outer road area along the access roads is around 30 ‰. The state border runs at the level of the first girder of the main bridge between Piers 1 and 2.

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Schematic drawing from 1913 of the Kentucky & Indiana Terminal Bridge between New Albany, Indiana (left) and Louisville, Kentucky (right). The connections of the trusses, which were later removed during construction, are indicated. Figures in Anglo-American units of feet (′) and inches (″).

Main bridge

The main bridge rests on seven reinforced concrete pillars with areas of around 4 m × 20 m and the round pillar of the swing bridge (No. 3) with a diameter of 11 m. The river piers (No. 1–7) were erected like the sandstone piers of the first bridge directly on the bedrock of the river bed, which, as explained above, is here at a shallow depth of about one meter. For the eighth pillar on the Kentucky bank and the abutment on the Indiana side, a pile foundation was used to anchor it in the ground . The piers extend up to a height of 37 m, with the superstructure at a height of about 30 m above the normal level of the underwater of the barrage.

188-meter truss on the south side in front of the 2013 McAlpine Locks and Dam
Schematic drawing of the 188-meter lattice girders (top and bottom right) and their support on the bridge piers (bottom left, the position of the old piers on the far left)

The superstructure consists of six trusses with tracks below. Starting on the Indiana side, these are two parallel-belt girders of 84 m and 122 m in length. This is followed by the middle section consisting of two semi-parabolic girders with a curved upper chord of 189 m each over the shipping channels, which are connected to one another by a parallel chorded girder of 114 m length at the level of the Sand Island river island . Finally, another 84 m long parallel-belted girder follows, which forms the transition to the Kentucky approach. The lengths here refer to the bridge fields between the central pillars and the spans between the supports are somewhat shorter, as one pillar carries the ends of two bridge fields; the span of the two longest girders is 187.51 m. The second 122-meter girder used to be used as a swing bridge, which was rarely used and is now fixed in its closed position.

Strut trusses with posts were chosen as the construction form for all girders , whereby, based on the design of the Pennsylvania truss developed by the Pennsylvania Railroad , additional reinforcement by means of intersecting struts was inserted over the entire height, as well as additional horizontal bars in the middle of the trusses for the semi-parabolic girders . The girders, including the cantilevered side lanes, are 19 m wide, the distances between the central axes of the 1.2 m wide belts are 9.8 m; the construction height of the two longest girders is almost 35 m. Additional emergency bays were provided at regular intervals for the only 3 m wide carriageways , which increases the width of the girders at these points again. The weight of the two longest girders is around 4,000 t, with the heaviest built-in individual components weighing over 35 t.

Driveways

Trestle bridges on the access roads to the railroad and road areas in Louisville, over which I-64 runs

The northern driveway in Indiana consists only of a parallel girder with overhead tracks 46 m long, to which a railway embankment is connected, which was built by pouring earth around the former trestle bridges of the first bridge and at the beginning of which is now the abutment . The embankment was previously interrupted by a smaller girder bridge , which is no longer available today and the opening of which was also filled in. The southern entrance on the Kentucky side describes a slight curve towards the southeast and consists of a 391 m long trestle bridge. This is made up of a large number of solid wall girders on steel lattice masts as well as a parallel-belted lattice girder with overhead tracks of 38 m length, which rests on two concrete pillars. In contrast to the north side, the side lanes with their greater gradient end here about 65 m in front of the abutment.

literature

Web links

Commons : Kentucky & Indiana Terminal Bridge  - collection of pictures, videos, and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Frank Griggs, Jr .: Charles Macdonald. In: STRUCTURE magazine. January 2009, pp. 45-47.
  2. ^ A b John E. Kleber: The Encyclopedia of Louisville. University Press of Kentucky, Lexington 2001, ISBN 978-0-8131-2100-0 , pp. 460-461 et al. 464.
  3. ^ A b Mace Moulton: The Kentucky and Indiana Bridge. In: Transactions of the American Society of Civil Engineers. Vol. 17, No. 365, 1887, pp. 111-168, here pp. 111-124, 132-134 and the like. Plate XVI.
  4. ^ Operating Electric and Steam Trains on the Same Track. In: Engineering News-Record. Vol. 34, No. 9, 1895, p. 131 f.
  5. ^ A b c Substructure of the Kentucky and Indiana Bridge. In: Railway Age Gazette. Vol. 51, No. 5, 1911, pp. 208-211.
  6. ^ The New Ohio River Bridge of the Kentucky & Indiana Terminal RR In: Engineering News-Record. Vol. 67, No. 8, 1912, p. 329.
  7. ^ William E. Rolfe, Lucius H. Cannon: The Municipal Bridge of St. Louis. In: St. Louis Public Library Monthly Bulletin. August 1922, pp. 165–198, here pp. 190 and 195 ( digitized version ).
  8. ↑ Riveted-Truss Span of Record Length. In: Engineering News-Record. Vol. 82, No. 21, 1919, p. 995.
  9. ↑ a b Kentucky and Indiana Terminal Bridge. ( Memento from July 18, 2011 in the Internet Archive ) Bridges & Tunnels, 2011.
  10. ↑ Grace Schneider: K&I bridge as a walking path? Railroad not backing down. The Courier-Journal, July 7, 2014. Retrieved April 13, 2019.
  11. ^ Marcus Green: Louisville business group revives push for pedestrians, cyclists on K&I; Bridge. ( Memento from June 24, 2017 in the Internet Archive ) WDRB Sunday Edition, January 29, 2016.
  12. ^ New Louisville Bridge Across the Ohio. In: Engineering Record, Building Record and Sanitary Engineer. Vol. 66, No. 21, 1912, p. 572 f.
  13. ^ A b c Erection of Kentucky & Indiana Bridge. In: Railway Age Gazette. Vol. 54, No. 2, 1913, ill. On p. 58.
  14. ^ Concrete Piles for Bridge Foundations. In: Railway Age Gazette. Vol. 51, No. 10, 1911, p. 480 f.
  15. ↑ United States Army Corps of Engineers : The Ohio River: Charts, Drawings, and Description of Features Affecting Navigation. US Government Printing Office, 5th Edition 1935, p. 269 .
  16. ^ A b c d Erection of Kentucky & Indiana Bridge. In: Railway Age Gazette. Vol. 54, No. 2, 1913, pp. 57-61.
  17. ^ Substructure of the Kentucky and Indiana Bridge. In: Railway Age Gazette. Vol. 51, No. 5, 1911, ill. On p. 209.
  18. ^ Glenn A. Knoblock: Historic Iron and Steel Bridges in Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont. McFarland, Jefferson 2012, ISBN 978-0-7864-4843-2 , pp. 33-37.
This article was added to the list of articles worth reading on April 25, 2019 in this version .