Stoney Creek Bridge

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Coordinates: 51 ° 22 ′ 48 "  N , 117 ° 27 ′ 58"  W.

Stoney Creek Bridge
Stoney Creek Bridge
Bridge with train going down the valley, 1988
use Railway bridge
Crossing of Stoney Creek
place Revelstoke and Golden in British Columbia , Canada
Entertained by Canadian Pacific Railway
construction Truss - arch bridge
overall length 148 m
Longest span 102 m
height 84 m (track level)
opening 1893, 1929
planner HE Vautelet (1893)
location
Stoney Creek Bridge (Canada)
Stoney Creek Bridge

The Stoney Creek Bridge is a single-track railway bridge across the canyon of Stoney Creek in the Selkirk Mountains in British Columbia , Canada . The bridge, located east of Rogers Pass , leads the transcontinental railroad between Montreal and Vancouver operated by the Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR) .

The first Stoney Creek Bridge was built in 1885 as a wooden trestle bridge . In 1893 it was replaced by a truss - arch bridge of steel, which was reinforced in 1929 by additional sheets to the outer sides. The relatively large gradient east of the pass was reduced in the 1980s by the construction of a parallel route over the Mount Macdonald Tunnel . Since then, the old, steeper route over the bridge has mostly only been used by empty freight trains, which predominate due to the mainly westward flow of goods to the east.

history

First wooden bridge in 1885

In return for British Columbia's accession to the Canadian Confederation in 1871, then Canadian Prime Minister John Macdonald had promised to build a transcontinental rail link from Québec in the east to the Pacific coast in the west within ten years . From 1875 the first sections were laid, but due to the immense costs, construction progressed only slowly. In 1881 the Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR) was finally founded and commissioned with the further construction. The link was completed in November 1885.

The CPR had chosen a southern route through the Canadian Rockies via the Kicking Horse Pass , which made a route through the Selkirk Mountains necessary in British Columbia . From 1881 she had the American surveyor Albert Bowman Rogers explore a pass crossing in the largely unexplored part of the Columbia Mountains . On the way over the Rogers Pass named after him (in today's Glacier National Park ) several deep canyons had to be overcome, for which the CPR for cost and time reasons in 1885 several large wooden trestle bridges among other things over the Mountain, Surprise, Stoney and Cascade Creek built.

For the highest bridge over the Stoney Creek , the CPR hired the bridge construction engineer Charles Conrad Schneider , who emigrated from Germany and who is based in New York City , who, based on the Marent Gulch Trestle he built in Montana in 1883 for the Northern Pacific Railway, built a 140 trestle Meter long wooden bridge designed. This consisted of four ten-meter-high Howe trusses that rested on three wooden pillars up to 60 meters high. The construction of the truss is named after its inventor William Howe , who has been using iron rods for the tensile vertical struts since the 1840s . With a height of 84 meters above the valley floor of the canyon, it was the highest wooden bridge in the world and surpassed comparable wooden railroad bridges of the time such as the Portageville Viaduct (1852, 71 m), the Dale Creek Bridge (1868, 40 m), the Marent Gulch Trestle (1883, 69 m) or the Mountain Creek Bridge on the mountain range (1885, 50 m).

Steel arch bridge 1893

Stoney Creek Bridge construction 1893.jpg
Stoney Creek Bridge (06) .jpg


Construction of the steel arch bridge around the old wooden bridge and test of the bridge with six steam locomotives in November 1893

Since the achievable load capacity with wooden structures was rather low and the maintenance and fire hazard were very high, they were mostly replaced after a few years by stone or steel structures. For the Stoney Creek Bridge, the CPR engineer HE Vautelet designed a steel arch bridge in the early 1890s , which was built around the wooden bridge in 1893 with prefabricated parts from England by the Hamilton Bridge Company while operations were still ongoing . After a successful load test of the new bridge on November 20, 1893, the old wooden bridge and the extensive scaffolding could be removed by the summer of the following year. The arch, designed as a truss , had a span of 102 meters and carried seven parallel girders with a total of 148 meters.

In addition to the necessary replacement of the many wooden trestle bridges, the CPR was confronted with extreme snow depths and the associated high risk of avalanches on the route over the Rogers Pass . Between 1885 and 1911, more than 200 people were killed on the route by avalanches, including 62 workers who were busy clearing an avalanche from Cheops Mountain on March 4, 1910 . At the beginning of the 20th century, the CPR therefore planned an eight-kilometer tunnel through Mount Macdonald . The Connaught Tunnel was completed in 1916. The new route reduced the gradients on the over 200 kilometers long mountain route and its length by almost seven kilometers. From the mid-1950s, British Columbia Highway 1 was built along the former route over the Rogers Pass . The expressway, completed in 1962, is protected by a large number of avalanche protection galleries and earth dams.

Reinforcement of the bridge in 1929

Erection of the additional half-timbered arches in cantilevered construction during ongoing operations 1929: A train passes the bridge towards the ascent to Rogers Pass

With the steady increase in the weight of the increasingly powerful steam locomotives and the loads being transported, the bridges on the line increasingly came to their load limits in the 1920s. In 1928, the CPR decided on an extensive modernization program to expand capacity. In order not to impair traffic, a new cantilever bridge was originally intended to replace the Stoney Creek Bridge , which was to be built about 12 meters away on the north side. However, due to insufficient subsurface conditions, the project had to be discarded and the existing structure had to be reinforced during ongoing operations. To this end, additional truss arches were installed on both sides in 1929 and the superstructure was replaced by solid wall girders . Since the existing truss sheets during the construction could not be loaded with the weight of the new sheets, one took advantage of the new carrier of the superstructure in the meantime for the construction of horizontal jib for the cantilever . For this purpose, these were braced at the arch ends using wooden masts ( auxiliary pylons ) and weighted down with railroad tracks at the bridge ends. After the completion of the first arch, the auxiliary construction was moved to the other side and the second arch was erected. This enabled the traffic - of up to 15 passenger trains per day during the daytime - to be maintained and the respective arches to be installed in two weeks. The entire construction project took five months from April to August. The final load test of the reinforced bridge took place on August 21, 1929 with four steam locomotives totaling over 1,000 tons, which corresponded to about twice the weight of the test of 1893, in which six steam locomotives were used.

Due to the reinforcement, the bridge was also able to cope with the heavy block trains for the transport of coal to the west , which appeared in the 1970s, and showed only minor material fatigue . In order to further increase the capacity of the line, CPR - which has been operating exclusively freight traffic since the end of 1978 - built an additional 45-kilometer parallel route through the 15-kilometer-long Mount Macdonald tunnel , which is around 90 meters deeper than the Connaught Tunnel and further reduced the gradients for trains heading west. About 25 trains run daily via the Mountain Subdivision between Field and Revelstoke . The section over the Stoney Creek Bridge and the Connaught Tunnel is mainly only used for empty freight trains heading east.

Since 1990, the Rocky Mountaineer railroad company has been offering rail adventure tours through the Canadian Rockies, whose First Passage to the West route between Vancouver and Banff also runs over the Stoney Creek Bridge.

description

The steel construction consists of a truss arch and the track girder made of solid wall girders as well as two outer pillars on the slope of the canyon. The connection of the supporting structures is realized by solid wall girders that are elevated on the arches and pillars and running at right angles to the track girder, whereby these are mounted in the middle of the bridge directly on the posts of the truss arch. The track girder dips into the arch in the middle and the track level runs at the top of the arch at the height of the upper chords of the truss arch. The total length of the bridge between the abutments is 148 m.

Truss arch

Since the bridge was reinforced in 1929, the steel truss arch has consisted of four arched ribs designed as stud trusses, with two on the outside - from 1893 and 1929 - connected at a distance of 1.5 m to form a load-bearing three-hinged arch . The truss arch is stiffened by horizontal bars and crossings between the inner arch ribs. The distance between the upper and lower chords of the arch ribs is 6.1 m at the apex and increases to 9.2 m at the arch ends. The span is 102 m and the arrow height (height between the fighting line and the apex of the arch) 24 m. The half-timbered arch has a width of 14.7 m at the ends (lower chords) and tapers to 8.5 m at the top of the arch (upper chords). The dimensions are based on the central axes of the double ribs; the external dimensions are about two meters larger.

  • Steel construction from 1893 with parallel-belt lattice girders as track girders

  • Schematic drawing from 1894, Red rectangle 3x18.pngthe stud frame installed in 1929 and the additional pillars are indicated in red ; Figures in feet (′) and inches (″)

  • The steel construction in 1988 with the track girders made of solid wall girders attached in 1929

  • The upper chords of the double ribs at the top of the arch at the level of the track level (left from 1893, right from 1929)

Track carrier

The track girder originally consisted of seven parallel-chorded lattice girders from 19 m to 26 m in length, but was replaced by 16 shorter beam girders in 1929. Above the truss arch, these have lengths of 4 × 6.4 m at the ends of the arch, where they are supported by the raised solid wall girders, and 4 × 12.8 m in the center of the arch. The stud frame for the shorter beam girders is placed on each truss node of the upper chords in the middle of the connections of the outer arched ribs; Exceptions are the stands at the arch end, which still come from the original steel construction and are only placed on the inner arch ribs. In contrast to the construction from 1893 with six support points per arched rib, the new track support rests on the double ribs at thirteen places. An additional steel pillar was erected between the abutments and the arch ends in 1929 and the track girder has beam girders 7.9 m and 11.6 m in length on the east side and 12.8 m and 13.1 m on the west side. The track girder has a gradient of 20.4 ‰ towards the west to Rogers Pass and describes a transition curve in the form of a clothoid to the following left curve on the west side . As with the first bridge from 1885, the track level has a maximum height of around 84 m above the valley floor of the canyon.

literature

Web links

Commons : Stoney Creek Bridge  - Collection of pictures, videos, and audio files

Remarks

  1. ^ John G. Woods: Snow Wars: An illustrated history of Rogers Pass Glacier National Park, BC The National and Provincial Parks Association of Canada, 2nd edition 1985, ISBN 978-0-920570-08-1 , pp. 2-5 ( PDF ).
  2. ↑ a b L. D. Cross: High Peaks Engineering: Rocky Mountain Marvels. Heritage House Publishing, 2014, ISBN 978-1-927527-80-1 , pp. 87-97.
  3. ^ Omer Lavallée: Van Horne's Road: the Building of the Canadian Pacific Railway. 2nd edition, Railfare, 2007, ISBN 978-1-897252-36-9 , p. 216 f.
  4. ^ Height of the CPR's 1885 Stoney Creek Bridge. Portal to the Online Railway Photos of Canadian Archives; accessed on November 3, 2019.
  5. ^ Anthony J. Bianculli: Trains and Technology: The American Railroad in the Nineteenth Century. Volume 4, Univ. of Delaware Press, 2003, ISBN 978-0-87413-803-0 , pp. 59-68.
  6. ^ A b Stoney Creek Arch, Canadian Pacific Railway. In: Engineering News. Vol. 32, No. 5, 1894, pp. 84-86.
  7. ^ A b c Phillips Bathurst Motley: Reinforcement in Place of the Stoney Creek Arch Bridge. In: Engineering Journal. Vol. 13, No. 5, 1930, pp. 309-315.
  8. ^ John G. Woods: Snow Wars: An illustrated history of Rogers Pass Glacier National Park, BC The National and Provincial Parks Association of Canada, 2nd edition 1985, ISBN 978-0-920570-08-1 , pp. 30-37 ( PDF ).
  9. ^ Ministry of Transportation and Highways: Frontier To Freeway: A Short Illustrated History of the Roads of British Columbia. Province of British Columbia, 1992, ISBN 978-0-7726-4505-0 , p. 16.
  10. ↑ a b The bridge is actually in a north-south orientation, but the cardinal directions are given in relation to the traffic flow. As a result, for example, the half of the bridge called the east side corresponds to the part facing north.
  11. ↑ Railway Investigation Report R15V0003. Transportation Safety Board of Canada (TSB), 2016; accessed on November 3, 2019.
  12. ↑ a b c J. F. Unsworth: Evaluation of the load capacity of a rehabilitated steel arch railway bridge. In: AREMA Proc. 2002 Annual Conference. Washington, DC September 22-25, 2002.
  13. ↑ Scenic Highlights of Rocky Mountaineer's First Passage to the West. Vacations By Rail, January 30, 2020, accessed July 14, 2020.
  14. ^ Stoney Creek Arch, Canadian Pacific Railway. In: Engineering News. Vol. 32, No. 5, 1894, pp. 84-86, here p. 85, Fig. 4.
This version was added to the list of articles worth reading on November 23, 2019 .