the bridge at North Station.

how old is it?

amd are there any B&M artifacts that still remain?

Sorry not shur hold it is. But I do know at 1 time in the begining of North Station it had a "SISTER' bridge right next to it.

That bridge the topic originator is talking about is 21-22 years old. North Station reopened in 4/20/85 after almost two years of reconstruction.

Robert Paniagua wrote:That bridge the topic originator is talking about is 21-22 years old.

Only the approach trestle on the station end is that recent. The bascule bridge itself goes back to the opening of the previous North Station/Boston Garden complex in 1928.

The 1928 North Station -- which was actually North Station #2 -- was built on the site of an older Fitchburg RR facility that had become the first North Station, and an older drawbridge over the Charles was replaced by four parallel bascule spans carrying two tracks each. Two of them were removed in the late 1950s when the number of station tracks was cut roughly in half, leaving the two that are there today. On January 20, 1984 a fire burned the wood pile trestle on the station end but did not affect the steel drawbridge. As Mr. Paniagua notes, that led to the temporary closing of the station while the trestle was rebuilt, and the MBTA also used that opportunity to rebuild the platform area, which of course was again reconfigured with the construction of the current North Station #3 that opened in 1995.

unfortunately, the MBTA did not use that 1984 outage to completely
rebuild the entire drawbridge/trestle area on the Charlestown side - not
to mention the drawspans themselves. To me it the Achilles Heel of the
northside.

Maybe the Beverly Drawbridge fire precluded additional major work at
North Station, but they should've done it then. It's going to be a major
disruption if and when an overhaul gets done.

D