I read on someones website or blog that people have constructed a petition to rebuild The Kinzua Viaduct. Did I read that correctly? I forget. More importantly, if I did read it, WHERE? My memory is not serving me well lately...Is this true?
Although it will take tons of money and substantial red tape, are they petitioning to do just that?

That is kind of on a par with the people who wanted to rebuild the two wooden shipwrecks in Wiscasset Maine after they burned a few years back. They wanted to reconstruct them as brand new shipwrecks. If you are going to spend that kind of money, why not at least sail them around for a while before you sink them in the middle of the town waterfront.

MX

It might be useful to possibly recount where said petition was supposedly being circulated. Certainly, any no-name in Podunk or the Phillipines can start such a petition or a website to lobby for the cause, but that means little if people aren't actually signing it. What newspapers are in that region--the Bradford Era and the Kane Republican, for two--seeminly have little to no online archives, as we discovered after the Knox & Kane enginehouse fire.

The odds of such a petition working? With the few people in that region and without a huge windfall of cash as seed money, slim to zero, sadly.

actually, I would take out the "slim" and just say "zero"..

this story is either an April fools joke, or if someone is actually serious, they are seriously deluded..
sort of like a 12-year old railfan saying he is going to build a full-size working New York Central Niagara in his garage, because he is good with tools..
he is either joking or amazingly clueless.

same thing with this Kinzua story..joking or clueless, no other options really...
and either way, its not going to happen.

Scot

I found it...this is probably the petition being referred to in the first post..

http://www.kinzuabridge.com/

It looks like that petition was started before the tornado..as a petition to "save and restore this historic bridge"..

After the tornado, it appears someone made the decision to just keep the petition on-line anyway, and morph it into a petition to "REBUILD the destroyed bridge after it was struck by a tornado"

before the tornado, the petition made sense, and was a fine idea,
comparable to the Poughkeepsie bridge.."The bridge needs our help, lets save it before its too far gone" kind of thing..all well and good.

but after the tornado, you would think the "Allegheny National Forest Vacation Bureau" would be smart enough to just quietly take the petition off-line...by leaving it up, they are only making themselves look foolish.

Scot

I think there was a little bit of both in there. At the time of the tornado, work was underway trying to stabelize Kinzua, as everyone realized the bridge was in bad shape. Basically, everything that remained standing were the parts that had been fixed. Given another 6 months to complete repairs, and it's possible the bridge would have survived.

In the months following the tornado, there WAS a petition going around trying to rebuild the bridge. You have to realize that Kinzua/Kane/Marienville is basically in the middle of nowhere, and the Knox & Kane was providing a fairly good tourist flow into the area where there are few--if any--tourist attractions. I remember seeing 12-13 car trains sold out in October, and they were running 5 days/week. Once the bridge was shut down in 2002, the wye on the north end was unavailable, and steam was dropped on K&K. Ridership decreased rapidly. Contractors were brought in to repair the bridge, and they were working when the tornado struck. Once the bridge fell, what was left of K&K ridership totally dissappeared.

The county wanted the bridge rebuilt because of the lost tourism at the park, and the money K&K was bringing to the county with motels/gas/food, etc. The petition was strong enough that it got to the state, but the cost to rebuild the bridge (somewhere around $50 million, if memory serves) was vetoed--no real surprise there. This would have been somewhere around the end of 2003/early 2004. Of course, then the K&K embargoed itself at the end of 2005, and I think the only runs since then were short trips out of Marienville about 3 miles north for a local Oktoberfest celebration in September 2006.

The county apparently STILL wants the K&K to operate and have been pushing for the railroad to re-start passenger operation again. This thread, http://forums.railfan.net/forums.cgi?bo ... 1113868282 on Railfan.net sums up the story up to this point. In shortened form, most of the equipment and engines were moved to Kane in late 2006/early 2007, and rumors persisted that K&K was going to try and run trains from Kane to Mount Jewett with steam in 2008. That is, until the fire. Since then, no one knows what is going on. I've heard the engines MAY not as bad as originally thought, but I don't know if there are any plans right now.

Kevin

Ya never know! Remember these crazy dreams that seemed so impossible?

...the State of Colorado wanting to replicate the bridges at Georgetown Loop for tourist trains

...guys wanting to build a British Pacific from scratch

...or reopening the line through Carizzo Gorge

....or the guy who wanted to rebuild a narrow-gauge 4-4-0 in his garage and then truck it around the country to run it

...and a guy in Jersey who wanted to load the nation's treasures on a train that would tour the country behind STEAM!

All it takes is a dream, a lot of work and appropriate leadership.

;-)

Rob

I was watching the show "Life after people" on History Channel last week, where they talked about what would happen if people suddenyl disappeared one day. They talked this bridge as an example of hoiw long structures of this type would stick around without maintenance. They interviewed a structual engineer who had peices of the viaduct, stating it was rusted through in some places and in horrible condition. I bet that didn't go well with the locals to hear that on TV!

http://www.poughkeepsiejournal.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080409/NEWS01/80409051

Doesn't seem crazy to think the Kinzua folks could get theirs.

Rob

Such a project will NOT happen. Pennsylvania politics favors the rich vein of votes at the lower corners. Not enough votes in the rural North.

As a PA state taxpayer, I believe they shouldn't spend a dime on that bridge. I'm sorry, but it is one thing to fix it up when it was still standing. But to reconstruct? Why? To please a few dozen tourists? The only other possible attractions (besides the bridge) were the Holgate Toy Company (makers of Mr. Rogers' trolley) and the Allegheny National Forest.


Money should be spent for other revenue carrying freight train or automobile bridges. Kinzua is dead... and that's how it should remain. Time to let go.

I tend to agree.

Of course the first rule of economics is everything is scarce, and the first rule of politics is to ignore the first rule of economics.

If I may play "devil's advocate" here, and certainly not for the first time here on this forum.............

There is no sound economic reason, absent a renewed major railroad traffic source (a coal mine, a power plant, etc.), for the renewal of the Poughkeepskie Bridge, no matter how many times I might allege that I will come up and spend the weekend just to wander over said bridge, and spend monies in local B&B's/restaurants in the process. For the most part, the arguments amount to "it's there, so we might as well enjoy its presence as best we can from an economical standpoint."

Kinzua blew down. In that case, we're dealing with (presumably) a rebuild of the middle-of-nowhere structure. Once it's repaired, then what?

There are far more people in the Hudson River Valley than in the Bradford valley.

If the central span of the Poughkeepskie Bridge had fallen into the Hudson River during that 1974 fire, would we even be having this discussion? Probably not. The L&HR and the bridge would both have been long gone by 1980, let alone 2008.

Here's a bridge that carried freight trains, a bridge that still stands - one that I could probably walk across today - if there are atleast iron girders to balance on - so, cost to restore - 25 MILLION DOLLARS. You don't get much for 25 million dollars anymore do ya? Must be those million dollar hammers.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poughkeepsie_Bridge

/Mitch

To make this bridge safe to walk over, someone's going to have to add handrails, a new/wider deck, etc. And all these additions up high on that bridge are the true definition of "high steel" work. High steel workers don't come cheap, trust me. I don't suppose you'd like to volunteer your labor for the efforts, would you? Maybe just to put up the safety nets for the rest of the workers?

I'm wagering the bridge could also use a good paint job as well, having probably not received one in several decades by now. Lead paint remediation, anyone? I would also point out that the trains of today are far heavier than those that used to traverse that bridge routinely.