Railroad
The railroad track that runs across the bridge was originally part of the Boston & Maine Railroad, and connected to South Berwick via an easement that is now Rt. 236. The bridge replaced a railroad trestle that was located just upriver. The trestle collapsed on September 10, 1939, sending the engine (B&M #3666) and baggage car to the bottom of the river, where they remain. It had been weakened when a caisson used in the construction of the new bridge dragged its anchor cables, which pulled out several of the trestle's bents.
Currently, the tracks lead only to the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard in Kittery, and are used for the transportation of nuclear materials.
Read more about this topic: Sarah Mildred Long Bridge
Famous quotes containing the word railroad:
“The worst enemy of good government is not our ignorant foreign voter, but our educated domestic railroad president, our prominent business man, our leading lawyer.”
—John Jay Chapman (1862–1933)
“This I saw when waking late,
Going by at a railroad rate,
Looking through wreaths of engine smoke
Far into the lives of other folk.”
—Robert Frost (1874–1963)
“... no other railroad station in the world manages so mysteriously to cloak with compassion the anguish of departure and the dubious ecstasies of return and arrival. Any waiting room in the world is filled with all this, and I have sat in many of them and accepted it, and I know from deliberate acquaintance that the whole human experience is more bearable at the Gare de Lyon in Paris than anywhere else.”
—M.F.K. Fisher (1908–1992)