|
Key Facts |
Bridge Name | Type | Road | Location | City | Crossing |
Hohman Avenue Railroad Bridge |
Bascule (Truss) |
Railroad (Abandoned) |
Lake County, IN |
Hammond |
Grand Calumet River |
It generally takes a decent sized river to get a truss bridge to be on a railroad / river crossing. That is why the state of Michigan for example has few railroad truss bridges, since most of their rivers are smaller. Similarly, a river must be a certain size to transport larger boats thus requiring movable bridges. Given this, a multi-span movable truss bridge was absolutely the last thing I expected to find on the Grand Calumet River, but here is one of two I found! The Grand Calumet River today is not "grand" in any sense of the word. It is the smallest width-wise of all three "Calumet" rivers, smaller in fact than the regular Calumet River and the Little Calumet River. The river is so small that many modern bridges crossing this river simply use culverts to cross it! The river is not very grand in that it is the most disgusting body of water I have ever seen. When I first saw this river from I-90, the first thought I had was that the water was a greyish-green! U.S. Steel at Gary used to dump toxic waste, including things like mercury other unpleasant things in it. Even today, I have heard rumors that it has 90% storm drain and industrial drainage to it. You can see the greyish color to the water in the above photo. Anyway, it is one sick-looking river, and this bridge is one of the few things adding beauty to the river. I am unsure why there are movable truss bridges on this river. From what I can see, it looks like the river might have once been carrying more water, and thus was larger. The two-span bridge passes over considerable distance of dry land, suggesting that once there might have been water there. So many canals and such have been dug in this area south of Chicago that it wouldn't surprise me if something has changed, and that long ago this river was large enough for boats. Today all it amounts to is a creek.
The bridge seen here is a very unusual bascule bridge which appears to have had extensive machinery removed. All that remains to tell of its movable past is the unusual shape of the truss at the northern end, and the gear track along part of that truss section. Based on these remains, this looks like it was an extremely unusual design of bascule bridge, perhaps a Page Bascule Bridge such as the Chicago and Alton Railroad Bridge. The truss bridge features riveted connections. There is a stationary through truss span at the south end of the bridge. Both trusses feature the subdivided Warren configuration. The rail-line appears to be abandoned, and it would be great to see a rail-trail evolve here or something to allow people to enjoy this bridge.
Gary Sprandel contacted HistoricBridges.org and provided the following personal recount of the history at this bridge.
The Hohman Ave junction (just southeast of the bridge) once hosted 7 railroads. As per the map, running due east-west was the New York Central, Pennsylvania (later Penn Central and Conrail now CSX IIRC) and the Indiana Harbor Belt, Conrail pulled up the NYC tracks and IIRC one of the Pennsy mains sometime in the mid to late 80's. The 4 roads that used the bridge in question were the Nickle Plate Road, those are the tracks that curve east after the east west tracks on the map, they are still active and owned by the Northfolk Southern. The other 3 were the Monon(later Louisville & Nashville in 72 IIRC) and the Erie Lackawanna with C&O trackage rights to Griffith In. Those are the tracks that the map shows heading southeast on the bridge alignment. The machinery removal you noted was done sometime in the mid to late 70's though it was not planned at the time. If you look at some of the photos closely you may note a very slight twisting, that along the removal of the counter weight and it's associated structural members occurred when a L&N grain train derailed, the car had been bouncing along the ties for a bit and (at least my guess) took a bad bounce once the derailed wheels hit the open ties of the approach trestle and piled up on the lift end. Since the L&N had the nearly parallel ex C&EI just to the west and Conrail had abandoned it's former EL tracks the decision was made to just clean up the wrecked freight cars and abandon the line over the bridge. Bear in mind I'm pulling this from memory of a news story in Trains magazine around the time though I did spend the last few evenings trying to search for the info on the net with little results. I am ,however, certain of the overall events though some of the finer fiddly bits are a bit foggy.
