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Hannibal Bridge | |
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![]() Hannibal Bridge in 1869 | |
Coordinates | 39°06′46″N94°35′19″W / 39.112672°N 94.58864°W |
Carries | Railroad and pedestrians |
Crosses | Missouri River |
Locale | Kansas City, Missouri to North Kansas City, Missouri |
Other name(s) | Missouri River Bridge |
History | |
Opened | 1869 |
Closed | 1917 |
Location | |
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The First Hannibal Bridge was the first permanent rail crossing of the Missouri River [1] and helped establish the City of Kansas (renamed Kansas City, Missouri, in 1889) as a major city and rail center. In its early days, it was called the Kansas City Bridge. [2] It increased area train traffic, which contributed to the building of Union Depot, the predecessor to the Kansas City Union Station. [3] It was severely damaged by a tornado and replaced in virtually the same location by the Second Hannibal Bridge.
Construction started in 1867, shortly after the end of the American Civil War, [4] and was completed in 1869. The bridge was built for the Hannibal & St. Joseph Railroad by the Keystone Bridge Company. [4] The completion of the bridge came after a short battle between Leavenworth, Kansas, and the City of Kansas for the Hannibal & St. Joseph Railroad bridge.
The bridge was designed by Octave Chanute, who also designed the Kansas City Stockyards and later became a pioneer in aviation. After hearing of the proposed bridge at the City of Kansas, Joseph Tomlinson contacted Chanute and they corresponded on how best to cross the Missouri River. In October 1867, Chanute hired Tomlinson as the superintendent of superstructure. [5] George S. Morison, who later became a leading bridge designer in North America, apprenticed under the supervision of Tomlinson and Chanute during the construction of the bridge. It was a swing bridge that could open in under two minutes, and had an arched truss design. Construction cost $1 million (equivalent to $21.8 million in 2023).
In 1886, the bridge was severely damaged by a tornado that collapsed a middle span. It was reconstructed and its truss structure was altered from an arch design to a traditional truss design. It was later replaced by the Second Hannibal Bridge 200 feet (61 m) upstream on the northern bank, but at the same location on the southern bank where it enters into the gooseneck cut into the bluff. [6]
Chanute is a city in Neosho County, Kansas, United States. Founded on January 1, 1873, it was named after railroad engineer and aviation pioneer Octave Chanute. As of the 2020 census, the population of the city was 8,722. Chanute is home of Neosho County Community College.
Octave Chanute was a French-American civil engineer and aviation pioneer. He advised and publicized many aviation enthusiasts, including the Wright brothers. At his death, he was hailed as the father of aviation and the initial concepts of the heavier-than-air flying machine.
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The Quincy Rail Bridge is a truss bridge that carries a rail line across the Mississippi River between West Quincy, Missouri, and Quincy, Illinois, USA. It was originally constructed in 1868 for the Chicago, Burlington and Quincy Railroad, a predecessor of BNSF Railway.
George Shattuck Morison was an American engineer. A classics major at Harvard who trained to be a lawyer, he instead became a civil engineer and leading bridge designer in North America during the late 19th century. During his lifetime, bridge design evolved from using 'empirical “rules of thumb” to the use of mathematical analysis techniques'. Some of Morison's projects included several large Missouri River bridges as well as the great cantilever railroad bridge at Memphis, Tennessee, and the Boone, Iowa viaduct. Morison served as president of the American Society of Civil Engineers (1895) as well as a member of the British Institute of Civil Engineers winning that institution's Telford Medal in 1892 for his work on the Memphis bridge. In 1899, he was appointed to the Isthmian Canal Commission and recommended it be built at Panama.
The Hannibal and St. Joseph Railroad was the first railroad to cross Missouri starting in Hannibal in the northeast and going to St. Joseph, Missouri, in the northwest. It is said to have carried the first letter to the Pony Express on April 3, 1860, from a train pulled behind the locomotive Missouri.
The Armour-Swift-Burlington (ASB) Bridge, also known as the North Kansas City Bridge and the LRC Bridge, is a rail crossing over the Missouri River in Kansas City, Missouri, that formerly also had an upper deck for automobile traffic.
The Amelia Earhart Memorial Bridge is a network tied arch bridge over the Missouri River on U.S. Route 59 between Atchison, Kansas and Buchanan County, Missouri. It opened in December 2012, replacing a previous truss bridge with the same name.
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The Bellefontaine Bridge is a four-span truss railroad bridge over the Missouri River between St. Charles County, Missouri, and St. Louis County, Missouri. It has four 440-foot (130 m) spans. Construction started on July 4, 1892, and the bridge opened on December 27, 1893.
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The West Jefferson Avenue–Rouge River Bridge is a historic double-leaf bascule bridge in Wayne County, Michigan, at the border of the cities of Detroit and River Rouge. The bridge carries Jefferson Avenue, a major thoroughfare in Southwest Detroit, over the River Rouge, an important inland route for lake freighters. The bridge was built in 1922, and was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2000.
The Union Covered Bridge State Historic Site is a Missouri State Historic Site in Monroe County, Missouri. The covered bridge is a Burr-arch truss structure built in 1871 over the Elk Fork of the Salt River. It was almost lost to neglect in the 1960s, but was added to the state park system in 1967, the same year it was damaged by a flood. Repairs were made the next year, using timbers salvaged from another covered bridge that had been destroyed by the same flood. In 1970, it was closed to vehicular traffic and was added to the National Register of Historic Places. Further repairs were made in 1988, and it survived the Great Flood of 1993, only to be damaged by another flood in 2008 and later re-repaired. It is about 120 feet (37 m) or 125 feet (38 m) long, 12 feet (3.7 m) high, and 17.5 feet (5.3 m) wide.
The Keystone Bridge Company, founded in 1865 by Andrew Carnegie, was an American bridge building company. It was one of the 28 companies absorbed into the American Bridge Company in 1900. The company advertised its services for building steel, wrought iron, wooden railway and road bridges.
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Joseph Tomlinson was an English-American engineer and architect who built bridges and lighthouses in Canada and the United States. In 1868, he co-designed and oversaw the construction of the Hannibal Bridge, the first permanent crossing of the Missouri River. He was the first person to hold the position of General Superintendent of Lighthouses for the new Dominion of Canada, holding that position beginning in January 1870. For eight years, he worked building railroad bridges for the Canadian government, and designed one of the most impressive bridges on the Canadian Pacific Railway where it crossed the Fraser River. He designed a railroad bridge over the Ashtabula River in Ohio, but was fired from the project after he refused to make supervisor-ordered changes to the design which he considered unsafe. The bridge failed on December 29, 1876, killing 92 people in a train derailment.
The Kansas and Missouri Bridge was an iron truss bridge across the Missouri River at Fort Leavenworth. The bridge opened in 1872 and closed permanently in 1955.