The Wabash Cannonball Bridge
and what season you are out traveling changes things a lot...
I'm guessing the middle of flood season is not a good time to be out traveling... lots of roads and bridges are possibly blocked off, washed out, or under water
http://www.spokesrider.com/2010/10/24/wabash-cannonball-bridge/
Kim remembered seeing this one over the Hudson River, in Poughkeepsie, it's called the "Wlakway Over the Hudson" and they say it's the longest elevated bridge for pedestrians
Built as a double track railroad bridge, it was completed on January 1, 1889, and formed part of the Maybrook Railroad Line of the New Haven Railroad.
Considered an engineering marvel of the day, the bridge has seven main spans. The total length is 6,768 feet and the top of the deck is 212 feet above water.
All seven spans were built of newly available Bessemer Process "mild" (between 0.16% and 0.29% carbon) steel, while the two approach viaducts were built of iron. It formed part of the most direct rail route of it's day between the industrial northeastern states and the midwestern and western states.
The bridge was the only fixed Hudson River crossing between Albany and New York City until the construction of the Bear Mountain Bridge in 1924, and was advertised as a way to avoid New York City car floats and railroad passenger ferries.
It was taken out of service on May 8, 1974, after it was damaged by fire.
On May 8, a tie fire, likely started by a spark from an eastbound freight train, damaged about 700 feet of decking and underlying girders on the bridge's eastern section.
The Penn Central had neglected the bridge's fire-protection system, which had no water on the day of the fire, and had laid off employees who kept watch for such fires. They then got an insurance payout of $360k, and handout of $480k taxpayer dollars which reinforced corporate opinions that govt would eventually save the day, and profits could be wasted on upper management instead of asset maintenance. Damage was at that time overestimated to be 1.25 mil by the railroad who looked to profit off the govt saving the day. They padded the bill.
But, further shenanigans occurred of course, as most New York big corporate and govt escapades do;
Authorization for the state to spend its share on bridge repairs had still not been given when ownership of the bridge changed in 1976 with the inception of Conrail. Having been forced to include the route over the bridge (the Maybrook Line) in its new system at the behest of Connecticut Senator Abraham Ribicoff, (no doubt profitting from that) Conrail announced that it would not promise to repair and use the bridge, until it had been paid a reactivation cost to $45.8 million, for work to make the route usable.
See how 2 years causes a 44 million dollar increase in costs? No? Well, then I suspect it's entirely because of who now ran the bridge wanting to get rich off the govt.
Seven years passed; pieces of the bridge over Poughkeepsie began falling onto U.S. Route 9 below, damaging passing vehicles. In response, the city sued Conrail and forced it to spend $300,000 in 1983 to remove the decking over the superstructure.
Finding the bridge to be costing it, instead of making it, money - Conrail then sought to dispose of the unused bridge with initial plans to sell the bridge to a bridge enthusiast who didn't want it. Instead, Conrail sold the bridge for $1 to a convicted bank swindler and ex-felon named Gordon Schreiber Miller, of St. Davids, Pennsylvania, to "get it off the books."
Miller and his successor, Vito Moreno, spent little or nothing on maintenance or insurance, while enjoying the $25,000 annual rent paid by Central Hudson Gas and Electric Corporation for its high voltage power lines across the Hudson. How do you think these guys happened to be the lucky chosen few to get handed a bridge they could ignore and get paid 25k a year to ignore it? Corrupt govt.
Central Hudson de-energized those power lines and relocated them under the river in 1985 instead of paying the crooks. Thereby ending Miller's only source of bridge income. During this long period, critical bridge navigation lights were mostly inoperative, resulting in large U.S. Coast Guard fines against the Miller corporation that all went unpaid. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walkway_over_the_Hudson
It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1979, and it was reopened on October 3, 2009 as a pedestrian walkway as part of the new Walkway Over the Hudson State Historic Park.
http://mz-across-usa.blogspot.com/2018/07/june-17.html
https://walkway.org/
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