Trestle bridge spans 125-year history

Structure was key link to driving Golden Spike

SANDPOINT - The bustle of activity and the towering construction cranes that draw your eye to the trestle bridge over Lake Pend Oreille are only the latest installment in a colorful story that is older than Sandpoint itself.

Evidence of the opening chapter, first written in the early 1880s, lies submerged in about 20 feet of water only a stone's throw to the east of the current bridge. Down there in the muck and murky water, the stubs of wooden pilings sit undisturbed, forming the same line they made when the Northern Pacific Railroad made its headlong run to complete the transcontinental railroad on Sept. 8, 1883 (see sidebar).

The work that is going on now to update piers and pilings on 650 feet along the north end of the 4,800-foot-long bridge is just the latest installment in renovations on a steel span that welcomed its first train in 1904. Some of its history also lies underwater, piled in heaps of rubble below the train bridge.

One of oddest historical curiosities still sits out in plan view - a turnstile section of the bridge that, from a distance, looks like a trestle within a trestle.

In the days when steamboats were a primary mode of transportation, mail delivery and shipping for the region, this upstart of a railroad bridge had to accommodate their passage from the Pend Oreille River to the west, across the lake and up a few miles of the Clark Fork River. A couple of blasts from an approaching steamboat whistle would send a man scurrying down from the wooden building that once sat atop the “swing bridge” section to operate the great, geared wheel at its center and crank the track sideways to let the vessel through.

“The guys who sat up there were basically gassed by the locomotives every time a train crossed the railroad bridge,” said Paul Rechnitzer, a columnist for The River Journal who has studied local railroad history and written books on the subject.

“The swing bridge wasn't very long-lived,” said Richard Hutter, a local historian and railroad buff. “It was used originally to let boats through, as well as tugs pulling log floats to the mills.”

The railroad, however, soon took over shipping as the area's timber and mining industries grew. And though the tugboats continued to work the lake, they no longer whistled for the bridge to swing around.

“When they used to haul log booms through there, they'd string them out and pull them along that way,” said Vern Eskridge, who works with the Bonner County Historical Society & Museum in Sandpoint. “They didn't need to open it up any more.”

“In the days of steam, they would have turned that bridge quite a bit for the passenger boats,” said Sgt. Ron Raiha, operations supervisor for the Marine Division of the Bonner County Sheriff's Department. “But it hasn't been activated as a common occurrence since about 1920 or so.”

According to Mike Denuty, a reporter for the Newport Miner and Gem State Miner newspapers in eastern Washington, there was one “oddball incident” that necessitated the use of the swing bridge sometime around the 1950s, but the actual date and details remained sketchy until one of the participants turned up.

“I can tell you when that happened, because I witnessed it,” said Sandpoint native Ted Farmin, who was a teenager working for a piled river operator at the time. “We had to go through the bridge for a job - that was in about 1956 or 1957.”

His boss had called the railroad to arrange for the opening, Farmin explained, and when they arrived, four men were waiting with what he called a “key” to create a gap in the span for them.

“There were two men on each side and they used the key to wind the bridge open,” he said. “When they were done, the ends were sticking out in the wind - it was different looking.”

Farmin got to know the trestle much better just a couple of years later, when he worked on the crew that helped replace piers from the 1904 steel girder bridge. The original pilings were 50 feet in length, held in place by piers that had no reinforcing steel. Starting in 1960 and lasting for about a year, Farmin and his crew used a five-ton, steam-driven piled river to hammer 90-foot pilings into the clay between the existing concrete piers. At each location, they would drive 25 pilings to form a five-by-five grid.

“They never did firm up,” he said. “You could have kept driving them deeper. They were held in place by friction down there in the clay.”

After excavating several feet of mud, the crew pumped water from around the pilings and put concrete forms in place. As each new pier was completed, they would settle the trestle's weight upon it. The older, adjacent pier was then detached from the bridge and dynamited into chunks that sunk out of sight. In that fashion, the work “leap-frogged” along the bridge until the new supports were in place and the old ones were submerged.

As those pieces of railroad history settled to the clay floor below, they took their place alongside the remnants of the first wooden trestle bridge that made up one of the key links joining east to west on the Northern Pacific Railroad.

“The original bridge had wood timbers in a square box - a wooden crib filled with rocks,” Sgt. Raiha said. “They're all still down there, about 15-20 feet away from the current bridge on the lake side. I can almost tell you their exact location by the number of lures I've lost over the years.”

The proximity of the two bridges was no accident. The location for both was chosen because they cross one of the shallowest sections the body of water has to offer. According to marine deputies who took depth readings last week, the water is about 40 feet deep under the swing bridge, approximately 30 feet under the track sections immediately on either side of it and less than 20 feet deep for the rest of the way to both shores.

The first trestle bridge was replaced for the same reason its steel girder neighbor keeps getting upgrades - trains are getting heavier all the time.

“The weight of the trains has become the determining factor,” Rechnitzer said. “And the trains going across that bridge are now up to a mile or a mile and a quarter long.”

A freight car rolling across the wooden trestle in the late-1800s would have weighed less than 60,000 pounds. By the time that bridge was replaced in 1904, the cars were weighing in at 100,000 pounds and, when the piers were upgraded in the early 1960s, that load had almost doubled. Freight cars traveling across Lake Pend Oreille today can carry more than 285,000 pounds.

For an entire train, the load coming over the trestle bridge might average from 10,000-12,000 tons. The bridge is often required to handle that much weight several dozen times in a 24-hour period.

“On a heavy day, when everything is running full tilt, there might be 65 trains-a-day,” Hutter said.

Which brings to mind one more historical curiosity about the train bridge - it is the structure behind the nickname the railroads gave this part of the country. Because all rail traffic east and west converges on this single section of track, they call the section “The Funnel.”

“What you've got there is a long, narrow, single track on a system that goes to multiple terminals on both ends and it hunkers down to one bridge over Lake Pend Oreille,” Denuty said.

“It's the weak link in that whole road from the West Coast to Chicago,” Rechnitzer said. “It creates a bottleneck that boggles the mind. If anything happened there, it would really screw things up in the Northwest. Seattle, Tacoma, Portland - they'd all be vastly affected.”

The journalist's interest in the steel girder bridge became so strong that he located the original plans from a railroad historical society, acquired a copy and built not one, but two detailed scale models for his hobby railroad sets at home.

“This was the railroad bridge that was they key to getting the Northern Pacific here to start with - it's that important,” Rechnitzer said.