Quincy Soldier's Memorial Bridge, Quincy, Illinois.
N 39° 55.913 W 091° 24.897
15S E 635436 N 4421399
Continuous through truss bridge over the Mississippi River, at Quincy, Illinois.
Waymark Code: WM9EE6
Location: Illinois, United States
Date Posted: 08/09/2010
Views: 10
Credits: Historic Bridges.com
This bridge is a rare example where Missouri and Illinois did exactly what they should with an extremely important monumental large river bridge. They built a new bridge next to the historic bridge, but then instead of demolishing the bridge, they left the historic bridge standing, and even rehabilitated the bridge and allowed it to carry eastbound traffic, while the new bridge carried westbound traffic. This solution saved money, preserved history, and increased the capacity of the crossings. Opportunities for this type of preservation occur all the time, but usually the owners choose to demolish the historic bridge, no matter that potential benefit there might be.
The bridge was designed by Strauss Engineering Company. Many people associate Strauss Engineering as the engineer for the Golden Gate Bridge, but the real history and heritage of the name is actually in Chicago as a movable bridge company. Much like with the Golden Gate Bridge, when Strauss undertook the project to build the Quincy Memorial Bridge, he brought in his people from Chicago, specifically a contactor from Chicago.
The Quincy Memorial Bridge is an extremely unusual and significant bridge due to its extremely large non-cantilever continuous truss spans. It is a continuous modified Warren truss. It is nearly a trapezoidal truss, except that the top chord changes its angle slightly towards the ends of the bridge, barely allows it to be a polygonal Warren. It is unusual because most bridges of this size were built as cantilever bridges. However, the Quincy Bridge is not cantilevered, it is just continuous.
The bridge is also significant as one of a rapidly shrinking number of big river historic bridges in the country.
HistoricBridges.org currently only has introductory coverage for this bridge, with a small set of overview photos only for this bridge. HistoricBridges.org intends to revisit this bridge in the future to fully photo-document the bridge with a full set of detail photos.
Parking Coordinates:: N 39° 56.015 W 091° 24.941
Date Built: 01/01/1930
Length of Span:
Length of largest span: 627.4 ft.
Total length: 3,510.5 ft.
Deck width: 23.9 ft.
Vertical clearance above deck: 14.2 ft.
www:
http://www.historicbridges.org/missouri/quincy/
|
Visit Instructions:
Log your find with a picture of the bridge with yourself or your GPS in the foreground. This shot does not have to be taken "on" the bridge. The shot should show the "truss" structure of the bridge as well.