F-line to Dudley via Park wrote:Gilbert B Norman wrote:Here is link to material regarding the Mianus River bridge incident:
http://blog.tstc.org/2008/06/27/remembe ... s-lessons/
I'd dare say this incident occurred before half this site's membership was born, but I remember it well, although living here in Chicago at that time, I had been ordered by the Fairfield Navy to report for duty at St Georges DE, from there we sailed (OK a motorboat - they were called "stinkboats' when I grew up with sailboats) up the Atlantic Coast to New York Harbor; there we learned of the collapse, and, in view of that I had a flight to catch that evening from KLGA and that Connecticut Limousine was shut down East of Greenwich, that is where the Captain (aka my Father) said we would sail to. We moored at Indian Harbor YC, and Limo was operating 12 passenger vans from a stop on Steamboat Road. While I made my flight with time to spare, all i can think is how disrupted lives in Fairfield County were, as the only highway alternative was Post Road or Metro North and Amtrak. We should also remember that Fairfield county residents are "not used to" having their lives disrupted (only disrupting other people's lives).
This leads one to wonder what would the region do if Tappan Zee was deemed unsafe and either greatly limited in its capacity or shut down all together. I simply cannot envision Bear Mountain handling all that much of its traffic - that one would be in the drink if it did.
I was only 5 when that happened, but I sure do remember all the bridge renewal that went on in CT for the next 10 years in the fallout from that. Construction EVERYWHERE for years on end all over the state. There were dozens of Mianuses waiting to happen at that time because of maintenance negligence. They did a pretty impressive job getting caught up on the deferred maintenance backlog during the Bill O'Neill administration, but after 2 decades of penny-pinching during the Rowland/Rell years it's like they're back where they started with the crumbling infrastructure and indifference to fixing any of it. Mianus itself was a traffic-snarled construction site for a full decade. That project took an absurdly long time to finish, and got a lot of area politicians booted out of office by surly commuters taking out their frustration with the state on a voting booth. There may be a whole generation in Fairfield County that grew up after the collapse, but there sure are a lot who remember the endless backups and ever-present construction cranes at that bridge.
You would've thought I-35W was the shock to the system the country needed to massively invest in renewal of structures at risk of failure, but I almost wonder if these disasters have to come in threes for the gov't to be capable of acting on anything.
GBN and F Line: I remember the Mianus River Bridge collapse myself-I was in my early 20s back then...
I want to mention that bridge had a type of construction that thankfully railroads did not use which was
a floating span link and pin type that was used basically in the 50s and early 60s I believe...
The pins corroded causing the links to give way leading to the collapse...
What that collapse showed us all that these types of infrastructure can not be ignored
or be neglected for any length of time...
MNCR's New Haven Line parallels I-95 at that point nearby...
As for the Tappan Zee Bridge hopefully a design that contains commuter rail or at the very least provisions
for future service is included in the new bridge's design and noting that some would like the old span preserved
for a Greenway...let's see what the cost will be for that option...
Hopefully a decision regarding what is to be done about the TZB is made soon and not subject to bureaucratic
and other delays...
MACTRAXX
EXPRESS TRAIN TO NEW YORK PENN STATION-NO JAMAICA ON THIS TRAIN-PLEASE STAND CLEAR OF THE CLOSING TRAIN DOORS