That’s an unnamed bridge in Pennsylvania constructed by the Erie Railroad (officially “Bridge 33.14”) and it’s a steel Pratt truss of a type I’ve directed again and again. Not in itself very interesting. This is a bit more interesting: one span of the bridge in the process of being destroyed by fire on November 4, 1890:
So, what happened? There may well be archival records, but as I’ve said before, there’s a pretty sharp limit on how much research I’m going to do just for a blog post, so there’s no reason not to speculate wildly. The first possibility is rather boring: portions of the bridge deck were wood, and the engines running over it were coal-fired. It didn’t happen often, but there are certainly records of still-burning cinders leaving the smokestack of an engine and starting a fire. The fact that there’s a train on the collapsed span might lend weight to that theory except that (1) I’d assume that a fire starting in that manner would take long enough to get going that the train that sparked it (literally) would be long gone by the time the heat could destroy a bridge and (2) that train figures in at least one other scenario.
The second possibility is related to the building just to the left of the fire.
I’m not interested in their doors, windows, and blinds, but lumber and coal yards were notoriously flammable. The fire could well have started there and spread to the bridge deck.
The third possibility is the reason that I’ve avoided saying where on the Erie RR this bridge was located. It was on the Franklin Branch in northwestern Pennsylvania, spanning Oil Creek in the town of Oil City. Western Pennsylvania had, for the nineteenth century, a pretty good supply of oil, which was primarily used at that time for kerosene. In 1891, the year after the bridge burned, Pennsylvania’s oil production peaked in volume and was more than half of the total US output. There were a bunch of boomtowns in western Pennsylvania created or greatly expanded by that industry, including Oil City, Titusville, and (my favorite) Petroleum Center. Oil Creek is a tributary of the Allegheny River, and runs past Titusville and Petroleum Center to merge with the river at Oil City. Since oil products were carried by railroad tanker cars in this days, it’s possible that the train on the bridge had a bunch of tanker cars and one or more of them were somehow the cause of the fire. That would explain the train’s presence on the bridge during the fire.
Unless someone reading this blog posts knows the answer, I’ll never know. But the speculation, about a bad event long ago, is interesting.
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