Built by the Northern Pacific railroad in 1882, the bridge was rebuilt for the first time in 1905 and a second time in 2008 when a dozen wooden support piers at the north end were replaced. Most of the bridge is comprised of steel girder sections supported by wood pilings, some over 100 feet long.
The truss section is a swinging section added to allow the passage of water craft. It was made to swing 90 degrees on its centre. This span is a Warren Through Truss of approximately 150 feet in length.
lists the bridge as the 90th longest in the nation and the longest in Idaho.
Coordinates given are at a viewing point in the park near the north end of the bridge.
Forty trains each day now pass through Sandpoint, but imagine how vast and impenetrable the Idaho wilderness must have seemed when surveyors for the Northern Pacific Railroad arrived in the 1850s. Before the railroad arrived, travelers to the area relied on Indian trails, and the town of Sandpoint didn’t exist.
The first railroad bridge was built in 1882, as part of a three-hundred-mile segment of track constructed west from Heron, Montana, to Wallula, Washington. The original bridge, updated in 1905, was constructed with wooden pilings and ties cut from virgin timber harvested from the surrounding forests.
In Eugene Virgil Smalley’s extraordinary History of the Northern Pacific Railroad , published in 1883, the building of the bridge itself is reported as somewhat less arduous than the construction of track leading up to the shores of Lake Pend Oreille: As the railroad approaches Lake Pend Oreille from the west, the country becomes broken with ridges and deep ravines, and much trestle and piling is required. Within three miles of the lake there are three trestles—one 2,000 feet long, one 1,400 feet, and one 1,300 feet. The work was performed by several thousand men, Smalley noted, “in spite of heavy snow-falls.” There were no settlements along the construction path east of Spokane. All supplies were hauled in on horse-drawn wagons. The coming of spring put an end to the miseries of snow, but it brought high water and terrible mud as work began on the bridge. Still, the workers endured.
The finished bridge had a length of 8,400 feet (1.6 miles). Smalley wrote that “six hundred feet of this structure runs across such deep water that piles from 90 to 100 feet in length are required.”
From Bridge Hunter