BURLINGTON, Iowa — After years of waiting, railroad officials say they’ve started looking for bids on an estimated $30 million Mississippi River bridge rehabilitation project, the Hawk Eye reports.
Federal authorities consider Burlington’s 134-year-old railroad bridge a hazard to river navigation, so they’ve authorized funding to replace the existing swing span with a 356-foot lift span.
Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railway spokesman Steve Forsberg said his company will hire a contractor and pay for the project, then get reimbursed by the government.
It will be up to the contractor to decide exactly how to go about it, but Forsberg said officials want to minimize interruptions of railroad and river traffic.
“There won’t be any interference with either river or rail traffic until you do the actual swap-out of the spans,” he said.
The goal is to do it in 24 hours or less, he said, but it will take 2 1/2 to 3 years of work to get to that point. Forsberg said the new span and associated equipment would be put together somewhere close to the existing bridge. It might be built on some kind of floating platform, or it could be built somewhere on the shore.
In either case, he said, the structure would be constructed somewhere out of the way and floated into position when it’s time to make the change.
The old swing span would be floated out and the new span would be floated in, he said. Hydraulics for the lift span would be put into place, and the pivot on which the swing span currently rests would be removed.
Work will also include dredging the channel and improvements to bridge piers, he said. The navigation channel through which river traffic must now pass is narrow, and the wider lift span would allow tows to go through faster with less danger to cargo and crew.
“It’s kind of a once-every-century undertaking,” Forsberg said.
The bridge at Burlington is for railroad traffic only and serves BNSF’s main line between Chicago and Omaha, Neb. A bridge spanning the Mississippi River has been a part of the Burlington landscape since 1868, when the former Chicago, Burlington and Quincy Railroad replaced a ferryboat that had been used to shuttle locomotives and cars between the city and what was then East Burlington, Ill.
Funding is supplied through the U.S. Coast Guard’s Office of Bridge Administration. The project has been in the works for at least 10 years, officials said.
Another Mississippi River bridge, at Fort Madison, also has been identified by Coast Guard officials as a target for replacement. The Fort Madison bridge features a railroad deck on its lower level and an upper highway deck. A $1 toll is charged to drivers headed to Illinois.
There’s no word on when funding will come through for that rehabilitation project, which would include a swing-span to lift-span conversion, Forsberg said.
Civic officials in Fort Madison have began asking authorities for a separate highway bridge, which would leave the privately owned railroad bridge entirely to the railroad.