New Zealand's Bridges: Mona Vale Church Bridge over the Avon River in Christchurch

March 2011 (-43.524 Degrees, 172.601 Degrees) Mona Vale Church Bridge

The next few bridges over the Avon lead to churches. This bridge in Mona Vale Park leads to the church where weddings are performed. It is a single span steel girder bridge with a timber deck and with diagonal members supporting the vertical rails. 

All of the bridges in the park have shifted due to liquefaction and ground shaking from the earthquake. When I was there, they were talking about razing the CBD, with all of its other gorgeous churches.

New Zealand's Bridges: Mona Vale Church Bridge over the Avon River in Christchurch by Mark Yashinsky is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

New Zealand's Bridges: Mona Vale Railway Bridge across the Avon River in Christchurch

March 2011 (-43.523 Degrees, 172.607 Degrees) Mona Vale Railway Bridge

A couple of hundred meters east of the Harakeke Bridge along the Avon River is a railway bridge going through Mona Vale Park. However, if there are any trains still traveling on the track, they are most probably carrying freight. 

I didn't see any trains operating in the two weeks I spent in Christchurch. After the creation of the European Union in 1993 a conservative government came into power, which privatized most public services including passenger rail travel. The rails were still shiny, which suggests that occasional rail service is still carried on the track. 

This bridge has a reinforced concrete box girder superstructure on seat-type abutments. A fence on the west side of  the bridge (which I climbed over) is meant to keep pedestrians off the track. 

New Zealand's Bridges: Mona Vale Railway Bridge across the Avon River in Christchurch by Mark Yashinsky is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

New Zealand's Bridges: Harakeke Street Arch Culvert Across the Avon River in Christchurch

March 2011 (-43.524 Degrees, 172.605 Degrees) Harakeke Street Arch Culvert

At first I was going to skip the half dozen little bridges over the Avon River a little west of Mona Vale Park. I decided to include them, perhaps for completeness or maybe because I'm in competition with Thornton Geoffrey whose book 'Bridging the Gap,' is the definitive work on Christchurch bridges (although now out of print).

The Harakeke Street Bridge is a little concrete arch culvert in a residential neighborhood. When I googled it, I found several official documents about widening it since there's little room for pedestrians who are being ignored by motorists. The bridge is 6.5 m wide and when two vehicles cross the bridge there are no room for the many pedestrians trying to get across the river. The bridge was built in 1900 and is about 10 m long.

I always feel a little uncomfortable calling a structure a culvert when its top is used as a driving surface. A true culvert should be underground with a roadway surface sitting on soil. However, its a little short for a bridge.The Avon River is quite narrow here although it widens considerably as it continues eastward,

New Zealand's Bridges: Harakeke Street Arch Culvert Across the Avon River in Christchurch by Mark Yashinsky is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.