Track Truss Bridge
Top Rated Mississippi River Bridges
Mississippi River Bridges are constructed using different designs and styles. Some are steel truss while others are arch type. They serve several purposes like railroad, automobile or pedestrian lanes.
Mississippi River, cited as the natural boundary for US divisions, either on west or east sections has made its mark in US popular culture. The construction of different Mississippi River Bridges carries several routes, and interstates made traveling a wonderful experience for the citizens. Until this very moment, new bridges are conscientiously being carried and carefully planned to help ease out traffic in other states.
One of the most popular bridges crossing the Mississippi River is the Rock Island Government Bridge built in 1856. It was the first bridge across the Mississippi River to connect Rock Island, Illinois, Davenport, and Iowa. It has two sets of railroad tracks above auto lanes. This was the bridge rammed by Effie Afton and went up in flames. Abraham Lincoln defended the railroad against a lawsuit filed by steamboat interests and navigation.
Stone Arch Bridge is the first bridge upstream built in1883 for Great Northern Railway. It connects Mississippi River and Saint Anthony Falls. It is now used for pedestrian and bicycle bridge.
Eads Bridge is the most historic and one of the oldest bridges. It is a combination of road and railway bridge. It was the first to use steel thru cantilever construction. It was responsible for the caisson disease or bends outbreak because it used pneumatic caissons. The construction killed 15 workers and injured 77 people.
Poplar St. Bridge, also known as the Popular St. Bridge, was completed in 1967. It is the busiest downtown bridge with 120,000 vehicles passing over it daily. It is a steel girder bridge with 8 lanes.
MacArthur Bridge is a narrow truss bridge with a monster curve. It is one of the oldest bridges built in 1917. It is now used as a rail traffic bridge.
Martin Luther Bridge was built in 1951. It is the second newest bridge, also known as the Veteran's Bridge. It has an overall length of 4000 feet with a cantilever style. It was refurbished during the 1980's.
Santa Fe Bridge is also known as the Fort Madison Bridge. It is the largest double deck swing span bridge in the world. It was completed in 1927. It serves as an automobile traffic bridge. It is owned by BNSF railway.
Hernando de Soto Bridge is known for its unique structural letter shape. The arches shaped the letter M and it made it into Guinness Book of World Records. It carries Interstate 40 connecting Memphis, Tennessee and Arkansas. It opened in 1973.
Memphis and Arkansas Bridge is the longest Warren truss bridge in the US. It carries Interstate 55 to Memphis. It is a cantilever through truss bridge, which opened in 1949.
Frisco Bridge is the longest cantilever truss railroad bridge in North America. It was opened in 1892. It was formerly known as the Memphis Bridge. It has an overall length of 4,887 feet.
Clark Bridge is also known as the Super Bridge. It is a cable stay bridge built in 1994. It was named after William Clark. It carries Route 67 with an overall length of 4,620 feet.
Norbert Beckey Bridge is the first bridge to use light emitting diode lights. It is also known as simply Beckey Bridge. It was completed in 1972 carrying Iowa Highway 92 and Illinois Route 92. It has an overall length of 3,018 feet.
Black Hawk Bridge is also known as the Lansing Bridge. It is a cantilever trough truss bridge with an overall length of 1,653 feet. It was named after Chief Black Hawk, an appointed war chief. It is listed in Historic American Engineering Record.
Julien Dubuque Bridge Connects Dubuque, Iowa and Illinois. It is an uninterrupted steel truss arch bridge. It carries 2 lanes of US Route 20 with an overall length of about 5760 feet. It is also listed in National Register of Historic Places. Last June 2008, it got struck by 15 barges.
Savanna - Sabula Bridge is a steel truss through deck bridge carrying US Highway 52. It has an overall length of 2482 feet. It was opened in 1932.
Bridge 9340 is also known as I-35W Mississippi River Bridge. It was the bridge that collapsed in August 1, 2007 killing 13 people and leaving many others injured. It was an 8-lane steel truss arch bridge with an overall length of 1,907 feet.
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Track Truss Bridge
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Five Secrets of Building a Weissenborn Guitar
For over twenty years I had always been very curious about building a guitar. I had played acoustic guitars almost since I could remember. I had a great mate who lived just down the road from and we did everything together so when he announced he was going to learn to play guitar, naturally, I didn't want to be left out! We bought a couple of new guitars and practised hard together even on cold Winter's night we went to the local Laundrette to practise when our folks threw us out!......Yes, my enthusiasm has never waned all through my great hippy youth until today where I find myself living on a yacht in Australia with eight wonderful guitars at the dodgy age of fifty eight..I even still do a few gigs!
But I digress! no matter how many guitars I owned over the years...and I have owned a few...I always had a secret desire to build one for myself. I proudly imagined how I would lovingly carve it all out, inlay it with black Coral, turquoise, silver and glowing mother of pearl. But, whenever it came to the crunch I just didn't have the balls to actually get stuck in and get to grips with it.
What was wrong? I couldn't work it out. I had achieved many other things I had set out to do along my journey through life. I'd built a 43 foot yacht, for one thing. I had learned that in order to finish a project off was to tell every living soul I knew that I was going to do it...that way, I knew that later,when my enthusiasm flagged, I just had to see it through, if I didn't I would get the reputation as a bigmouth 'gonna be, wanna be" I secretly thought of it as my 'insurance policy! It really helped, for sure.
However, as much as I loved playing, my life took a big jolt when I finally went to see a great Aussie guy called Jeff Lang play at a concert in my home town. I sat enthralled, spun out, totally blown away at the rich, vibrant, cool whiny sound that seemed to leap from this amazingly shaped lap steel guitar.
It just did not seem possible that a guitar could sound so full, so haunting, so melodic, to tell you the truth, I was so overcome with it all, I felt tears run down my face I felt such a fool...Well, what a state to get in!It was a big crossroads in my guitar playing!
This incident never left me the same again... I wanted one of those Weissenborns so bad it hurt. I felt I couldn't face my other guitars again. I sulked, we didn't speak for some weeks.....but I gave in, had to I'd wanted a Taylor all my life...now I'd got it, wasn't I ever going to play it again? Something was different though...I wanted to play that bloody thing like I'd never wanted to play before, so I did, you'd better believe it. I dont even want to think about how long and how many hours it took me to start improving but I damn well did.
I've taken all this time to get around to the whole point of this article. I had got over the indecision that had haunted me...I couldn't afford two or three grand to buy a good lap steel. No way. I luckily have a great friend in Luthier Kim Hancock of Tamborine Mountain in Queensland. Kim, a kind soul along with his two boys ( also fearsome luthiers) Dane and Sean, build guitars that are something else already established as amongst the best in the World market...
Kim was really encouraging and gave me my first secret, unwittingly. If you start it and stuff it up...so what? It's only a piece of wood, see what you did wrong, chuck it in the garbage and order another piece..simple! Then, do it right the second time!
The second secret came right on the back of the first one.! Dont let the project intimidate you...take control of it..you are the master, it is the subject. The best secret of all came as I started to build ....I remembered the words during our conversation a few weeks before....Treat every stage of the build as a separate project. The back, the sides, the bridge, the headstock.. a separate project. See, thats a good secret, I reckon. That way you can see the build as lots of small projects instead of one big overwhelming monster......Hey and give yourself a reward every time you complete one of those stages..a beer, a lollypop, go splash out people, dont get cheap on yourselves! The next secret is this: During the build there is always something that will stop you dead in your tracks. With me it was" How in Hell's bells am I ever going to get the back join perfect or the front one, come to mention it?"Well, my secret was in the fact that I had a good guitar making book supplied to me by Kim. The answer was in there! Glue some sandpaper to a straight edged spirit level and then sand each section smooth as a baby's bum...see, simple when you know how!
So, find your way round every problem by thinking about it carefully...there is always a way round each problem you encounter, it may not always be the way you had imagined! Oh, yeah, the name of the book is " A guitar Maker's manual by Jim Williams" You can get that from Kim Hancock's site www.Australian Luthiers supplies.com.au Let me say though, there are no plans for a Weissenbourn in there, you can get those from StewMac in the U.S. or other suppliers.
The final secret is a real simple one: Make a firm decision to see it through to the end. I actually live on a yacht in a Marina.. I nearly talked myself out of building the guitar time and time again. I have heard so many times" How can I build a guitar when I havn't got a shed, a bench saw and so on?" BS people, BS with a capital BULL. Make the best of what you have, get your timber supplier to cut up the timber to size, then get it planed so you dont need all that expensive gear, Man,THEY got it all!
There are a few more secrets too....I have written a book "How to build a Weissenborn Guitar"that will give you a few more lights to shine in those dark corners of that mind of yours! to help you do this thing!This guitar is really basic, just like the originals, no purfling ,no truss rods( they dont need 'em) bone simple but the sound! YEE haaa! It tells you how to build the guitar of your dreams at your own speed right there at home, in the shed garage or flat with the very minimum of tools and experience. I now have a site all about the build called www.buildaweissenborn.com that you can also see in the authors resource box.
There are some pictures of my new weissenborn there, made incidentally, with Australian Maple( a cousin of Koa) and an indian rosewood fretboard which actually does not have any frets on at all and maybe never will! Finally, I do hope that any of you out there reading this article will want to know how my Weissenborn turned out.....bloody awesome! It is the loudest guitar I have ever heard in thirty years of playing... I can hardly sing over the sound of it!!! and that's saying something people cause I do have one loud voice.. not a good one folks, but a loud one!! It's been a levelling but incredible experience, thanks again to my good mate Kim Hancock for all the help and advice he so freely gave to me especially when he didn't have to!
Terry Buddell is a freelance journalist and a Marine surveyor, boat designer and shipwright, He lives on board his yacht "The Nicky J Miller' that he built himself on The Gold Coast Australia and has sailed his yacht up the East Coast to the beautiful Whitsunday Islands. He is currently resident in Gladstone Queensland where he is building another boat for his collection of plans for sale on the internet. In his spare time(what spare time??) Terry, a keen guitarist has also built a Weissenborn lap steel guitar, a long time dream! Pictures for most of the articles can be viewed on the website below.
Terry can be contacted on http://www.buildaweissenborn.com and will have another site up and running shortly called http://www.slideguitarworld.com
About the Author
Terry Buddell, a freelance writer, lives on board his yacht in Australia. He recently built a weissenborn acoustic slide guitar on board and you can see photos of the build, buy the book on how to build it, listen to a sound clip of the guitar or even buy the plans for the guitar on www.buildaweissenborn.com .