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A bridge is a section of a song that’s intended to provide contrast to the rest of the composition, and that prepares for the return of the original material. Road bridges might not be intended to provide contrast, but they do anyway. In art and especially movies, bridges (except Lloyd Bridges) are on the other hand often used as metaphors for connection or involvement.
There is something special about bridges. Sometime in the past, someone cared enough to want to establish this connection, to bring people together. That’s why I like the Australian tendency to name bridges after people.
It’s not just individual bridges here, either – whole classes of bridges were named after their inventor. Take the bridge over Pearces Creek in Hornsby shire, north of Sydney. The 1894 bridge is a McDonald truss bridge, but not just any McDonald truss bridge – it is believed to be the only timber truss road bridge in NSW to survive with its original style deck still in use. So show some respect should you ever take that road.
On a ride down alongside Big Muddy I was fortunate to be able to photograph many different bridges. Photo: The Bear
John A McDonald, the designer, was a significant figure in bridge design and construction in NSW, and McDonald truss bridges are good examples of early Australian methods of bridge construction. Timber truss bridges were developed and refined in Australia to achieve the highest level of timber bridge construction at the time, anywhere in the world.
Timber truss road bridges were built extensively in NSW because of the high quality of local hardwoods and the shortage of steel until the steelworks at Newcastle were built in the early 20th century.
A flood floated this bridge away, but it was restored and replaced— higher! Photo: The Bear
In the US, there was a fashion for covered bridges beginning in 1804 with the Waterford Bridge in Connecticut which spanned the Hudson River for 105 years. A covered bridge is just a timber-truss bridge fitted with a roof, decking, and siding, which in most covered bridges create an almost complete enclosure and makes the construction less vulnerable to weather. They were not, apparently, “built to soothe skittish animals who might be put off by the sight of rushing water; to provide shelter to travellers caught in a storm; or to provide a place to court your lady and secretly give her a kiss (thus the nickname Kissing Bridge).”
There are timber bridges in northern California too, but most of the back roads seem to cross the rivers and creeks on wrought iron bridges. In Utah, the citizens of Rockville are trying to save their iron Parker Through Truss bridge, the last in the State. Many iron constructions are effectively kit bridges – made elsewhere and taken to their location in bits before being assembled on the spot, tab A into slot B. Subsequently they have often been moved as the road they carried needed higher capacity constructions, and placed where there was less traffic.
Recognize this one? That’s me in the foreground on a Cavalcade. Photo: Kevin Wing, courtesy of Kawasaki Motors
The California Department of Transportation’s Historic Highway Bridges of California tells me that “the proliferation of railroads in the late 1800s brought a flurry of bridge building. The railroads favored… iron or steel trusses for larger structures… The technologies and materials were already in place when the need for highway bridges arose soon after the turn of the century. Thus many of the earliest California highway bridges were built by the same bridge companies from designs similar to the train bridges, and in some cases actually were recycled train bridges.
“Those boxy metal truss spans that could be ordered up in standard designs from the bridge company catalogs served the purpose of facilitating California highways expansion at a good pace in the first fifteen years of the twentieth century… Some have even been dismantled and moved to new locations.”
Laminated timber construction is like making plywood under extra pressure. Photo: The Bear
And there’s more to country bridges than you might think. Take the Pound Crossing Bridge near Dungog, in northern NSW. When it was opened in August 1994, the 60-meter-long bridge had the largest cellular stress laminated hardwood timber bridge deck in the world. Just exactly what is that? If you’re Australian or if you ever make it to Australia, go and have a look at it should you be interested in finding out more. It’s quite educational.
What inspired this story, and what I would like to pass on to you, is the feeling that I get when I come out of some stretch of forest on a back road, gravel or tar, and suddenly see one of these iron beauties or one of the Australian wooden bridges in front of me. It’s a kind of connection to the days when they were built, when the riders of early motorcycles no doubt found them just as useful as I do now.
Ghostly Hendersons, Matchlesses or NSUs drift across them…
Intricate detail on some iron bridges speaks of pride in workmanship. Photo: The Bear
The American iron bridges, just like the few remaining wooden arch bridges on the NSW North Coast, also take me back to a time when craftsmanship was a more powerful driver than it is today.
Modern is not always best; new is not necessarily the most useful; reinforced concrete is not the inevitable material to use. Go ride some old bridges of your own, and consider what they mean.
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