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Matt Ridpath's Bridges and Structures Wiki

This wiki contains essays I have written about various bridges and structures I have visited and photographed. It is a work in progress, as all of these pages are at least eight years old and have been brought over from another platform. If you happen to stumble across this page, however, I hope you find it interesting and informative.

Historic Bridges

While in college, I gained a passion for learning about historic bridges, bridges built before the 1960s, before all bridges became cookie-cutter slabs of concrete indistinguishable from each other. Old bridges are survivors, relics of a pre-computer age, utilizing geometry to achieve what is now done with brute force materials. Many that I visited ten years ago have now been replaced, so I consider it a privilege that I was able to witness them.

Truss Bridges

These are bridges in which the roadway or railroad is held up by a cage-like structure of dozens of smaller steel (or iron) members instead of a few heavy beams. This page contains links to a few truss bridges I have visited in North Carolina and elsewhere.

Arch Bridges

These were the original "signature" bridges, constructed with aesthetics as well as functionality in mind, and meant to give a particular crossing distinction.

Steel stringer, girder, and tee-beam bridges

These are the unassuming structures, the structures meant to perform a job without being noticed. Highway departments have no reservations about maintaining such bridges built as early as the 1920s. Despite the lack of intricacy in their designs I still find the older examples of these structures (those built before the 1960s, mostly) to be worthy examples of our transportation heritage.