Fort Madison Toll Bridge - Credit: Wikimedia Commons
Fort Madison Toll Bridge - Credit: Wikimedia Commons
The Fort Madison Toll Bridge (also known as the Santa Fe Swing Span Bridge for the old Santa Fe Railway) is a tolled, double-decked swinging truss bridge over the Mississippi River that connects Fort Madison, Iowa, and unincorporated Niota, Illinois. A double-track railway occupies the lower deck of the bridge, while two lanes of road traffic are carried on the upper deck. The bridge is about long with a swing span of , and was the longest and largest double-deck swing-span bridge in the world when constructed in 1927. with It replaced an inadequate combination roadway/single-track bridge completed in 1887. The main river crossing consists of four Baltimore through truss spans and a swing span made of two equal arms, long. In 1999, it was listed in the National Register of Historic Places under the title, Fort Madison Bridge, ID number 99001035. It was also documented as survey number IA-62 by the Historic American Engineering Record, archived at the Library of Congress. Construction and photographic details were recorded at the time in Scientific American magazine. Read more on Wikipedia
Source: en.wikipedia.org