Thursday, March 25, 2010

Chilean Bridges: Puente de Tinguiririca

The Tinguiririca River is famous for its whitewater rapids and because a plane carrying rugby players once crashed into its source on the Tinguiririca Glacier in the Andes.

The Tinguiririca Bridge is a railroad bridge (on the west side of Route 5 Sur in Chile). In this photo we are looking at the bridge between the barrier rails of the adjacent highway. A variety of lifelines including gas, water, railway, and highway often conveniently share the same right-of-way (at least until one of them starts having problems that impacts the others).

This is a through truss bridge and I believe it's a Pratt truss because the diagonal elements slope downward towards the middle of the bridge. It is a three span bridge with catenary elements to hold the electric line that powers the locomotive.
Creative Commons License
Chilean Bridges: Puente de Tinguiririca by Mark Yashinsky is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.

No comments: