Talk:List of crossings of the Upper Mississippi River

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[edit] List of crossings

I created this list to potentially help create stubs on the crossings. The lat and longs are all from USGS aerial photos or topos using USA Photomaps. I had to use some creativity on naming some of the bridges, especially the ones in Minnesota. If you are from Minnesota and know the official name, please feel free to update it and create a stub page with that name. Additionally, it is not quite complete between the Lake Itasca and the Twin Cities. --Dual Freq 01:49, 8 April 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Bridge Names

Not to discredit the source material, but it kind of bothered me that the "Climbing the Mississippi River Bridge by Bridge" ISBN 0964451808 book shows the Muscatine, IA bridge with the name of Norbert Becky Bridge instead of Norbert Beckey Bridge. It probably was a typo, but it kind of raises some questions. As for the La Crosse bridge, I would prefer a name less verbose than La Crosse-La Crescent Canadian Pacific Railroad bridge. 1870's materials about the bridge simply call it the "Bridge Over the Mississippi River at La Crosse"[1]. It looks like that includes all 4 bridges, Main Channel, East channel, French Slough and the span over the Black River. I'd say a single article would be acceptable covering all four bridges and calling it something like La Crosse Rail Bridge. There is only one rail crossing at La Crosse, so I don't know that the name needs to be too descriptive to include owner, channel etc. --Dual Freq 23:11, 29 April 2006 (UTC)

Yeah, I agree that the name is a bit cumbersome. Then again, it could have been La Crosse-La Crescent Canadian Pacific Railroad, Formerly Milwaukee Road, Main Channel (the one with more water under it) Swing Bridge, Constructed in 1872 With Two Steel Rails Spaced Four Feet, Eight and One-Half Inches Apart. I'm not totally sure that Mary Costello has all the bridge names 100% correct. I'm not even sure that railroads have official names for their bridges. It wouldn't hurt my feelings to rename it. (As an aside, that's an interesting link -- you might want to add it to La Crosse-La Crescent Canadian Pacific Railroad, Main Channel Bridge or whatever the shorter name should be.) --Elkman - ^(talk) 23:36, 29 April 2006 (UTC)

I'm certainly not the arbiter of bridge names, so I probably won't be changing it. I found another interesting LOC record, HAER NE-2. Yes, I know it says Nebraska, but there are 500 data pages detailing some of the bridges of the Mississippi, Ohio and Missouri, including the Winona Rail Bridge, now demolished. They go into serious detail, how many pounds of steel, heights of pillars and depths of caissons, span lengths, etc. The names are pretty bland in there too, but I guess in the 1860s if you call a bridge the Kansas City Bridge and there are no other bridges over the Missouri River at the time, then it's not too confusing. Rail Pictures has some bridge pictures, probably can't use them on Wikipedia, but still interesting. I typed in La Crosse bridge as a keyword search and it gave 3 pages of pictures. Including pictures of the swing span replacement on the Black River bridge. They replaced the swing span with a bascule span. Kind of neat. --Dual Freq 00:08, 30 April 2006 (UTC)

I changed it to La Crosse Rail Bridge. I don't know what's official, either, but the long name was almost as long as the bridge itself. --Elkman - ^(talk) 00:11, 30 April 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Additional information

I did a study of the Mississippi rail bridges, but I'm not sure it adds anything to this fine effort. http://www.trains.com/TRC/CS/forums/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=535712 —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 70.66.50.193 (talk • contribs) 02:28, October 2, 2006 (UTC)

I think that's one of the sources I used. The Keithsburg Rail Bridge certainly had its roots in trains.com. Thank you. --Dual Freq 04:09, 23 January 2007 (UTC)