Montana Rail Link's bridge over the Yellowstone River collapsed as a train was passing over it this morning. My understanding is that the crew was unharmed, but the multi-span truss bridge was destroyed.

Here's an article with a photograph from The Billings Gazette:
Train falls into river when bridge collapses near Columbus

Crackerjack reporting to be sure! A Pulitzer prize is no doubt in that writer's future...

There are some more photographs attached to this article by KRUL radio:
Railroad Bridge Collapse Near Columbus, Tanker Cars in River
I was impressed by how quickly the Billings Gazette published their article. KRUL says the the first 911 call came in at 6:12 AM MST (7:12 AM CST.) That's only three hours before 10:15 CST, the times the timestamp on my post above.

In the absence of genuine intelligence, could this be an example of the blessings of AI ??

Actually, something they will be trying to figure out is if the bridge collapsed causing the train to derail, or the opposite, but I doubt that the person who wrote the original understands that distinction. I generally would bet on the latter, a derailment first taking out the bridge, given that these were tank cars loaded with molten sulfur and asphalt, but we'll find out how old that truss bridge is soon enough.

Hulcher's banner year continues...

Not as fast as we used to be able to--Bridgehunter.com is still down for updates/transition.

This was one of the so-called "Twin Bridges" at that location--a road and a rail truss bridge side by side, both three spans, but different designs and paint. The silver road bridge was torn down in the spring of 2021, before the historic 2022 flooding could have impacted it.

Interesting that one pier is gone. A collapse due to over stress usually doesn’t do that. Scour from the river? Or the mass of a derailing train catching the bridge took it over? The NTSB report, if there is one, would be interesting.

Word from another site has it that there was water to within a few feet of the bridge deck. I'm betting on scour.

This photo, added to the original article later, would seem to show a car derailed on land, but it is not clear if it is on the east or west side (the train was westbound):

And the NTSB's as well. Have to wonder how much maintenance MRL's previous owner performed recently knowing they were unloading the railroad to BNSF.

First off, none of this is rail-preservation related, unless you're into saving old bridges like I am.

Second, note that in the coverage, one entire pier has essentially "gone missing."

Third, the location is commonly known as "Twin Bridges" because there WERE two three-span truss bridges parallel to each other at that site--one road, one railroad. The road bridge, reduced to serving two or three now-isolated homes/ranches, was dismantled by Montana in 2021 because one of the two piers was badly underscoured by the erosion of the Yellowstone River. That was about a year BEFORE the epic, damaging, headline-grabbing 2022 flooding affecting Yellowstone National Park and other locations along the Yellowstone River, which destroyed several other vintage bridges I had photographed in the area the previous year.

Fourth, there were unconfirmed reports of high water in the river at the time of the derailment.

Given the information above (which I can't cross-reference with BridgeHunter.com for the time being), any speculation that the train derailed due to deferred maintenance on the part of MRL is premature at best and libelous at worst.

I doubt that you are an attorney, especially not in libel law, so you really don't have any authority to be making such an assertion, it would be like me claiming that you need gall bladder surgery from three thousand miles away without any training or competence in internal medicine. I used to teach libel law at the university level, and this isn't it. Not in the United States anyway, where libel laws are extremely weak, due in large part to our very strong protections of freedom of speech and freedom of the press. My noting that when companies are selling a property that they have a tendency not to maintain it would both meet the common sense criteria and could be backed up with past evidence.

I disagree.

Bridgehunter says the structure was built in 1918, so we've lost a 105-year old railroad structure that had been preserved in place and was still serving the purpose it was designed for.Wikipedia has a decent page about that: Bridge Scour

Back when I was a young engineer in the early 90s, there was a really crude rule-of-thumb that said the depth of scour under a bridge pier could be up to three times the depth of the river's maximum flow. In other words, if the 1% chance event (aka the 100 year storm) would result in a 20 ft deep river flowing under the bridge, then the piles under the bridge piers had to reach down at least 60 feet below the river bottom.

That rule of thumb is obsolete -- it's been replaced by hydraulic modeling and software -- and I only mention it to show that the scour depth is much deeper than you would think it would be.

I took two courses covering libel/slander law as part of my English-Journalism degree, so I'm not your usual online blowhard.

In addition, you apparently got the facts behind your assertation wrong. By every account published over the past year and a half, Montana Rail Link was NOT "selling the property." Instead, their long-term lease over portions of BNSF were being terminated by the lessor, BNSF. MRL was apparently at one point selling locomotives now surplus to their needs, and their website still offers properties for lease (not sale) and car storage services. But the right-of-way was not theirs to sell. I've recently been back and forth with a couple railroads where they have sold an operating rights agreement but not the right of way under the tracks (and therefore reserved the right to ban excursion operations over otherwise suitable trackage in many ways), so I've learned to parse such distinctions carefully.

https://montanafreepress.org/2022/01/11 ... e-to-bnsf/

It's somewhat odd you would claim to craft your words so carefully so as to avoid libel or defamation, but still miss the actual facts of the matter so badly.

I've only skimmed over numerous media reports of both the rail bridge failure and the dismantling of the road bridge and the reasons for the latter, but I've had some experience having to address bridge pier collapse and scouring on several past bridge preservation attempts and documentation of bridges post-"Tropical Storm Agnes" flooding, including my hometown railroad bridge. This is all speculation at the time, but it's not completely uninformed speculation, either, any more than "the train derailed and took out the bridge" would be.