Long Bridge and Calm River
Eric remarked this morning that the winds were really calm overnight, and this allowed the temperatures to drop not only over in "the valley" (Shenandoah), but also at DCA (just a mile south of this location).
Upon crossing the river on the Metro Yellow Line, I found a really calm, silky smooth river, one that is not often seen. It was almost perfectly glass smooth. I made some other images, but the center section of this bridge, the Long Bridge, has a nice old truss in it, so I went with this one. A lot of the bridge has been marred with graffiti but this part is more or less clean.
The span is designed to rotate to admit overheight traffic, but I don't think it's budged in decades, and it probably couldn't anyway. Besides, bridges upstream of it are too low for such overheight traffic regardless. So it sits as a monument to a time when America built solid road and railroad bridges. The plan is to some day widen this bridge to three or more tracks, which will probably be the end of the truss.
Railroad Note - This bridge was once owned by the Pennsylvania Railroad which had it electrified, but at some point the catenary was removed. The RF&P began just south of here, and the RO signal is at the south end of the bridge. It's owned by CSX now and it sees dozens of movements per day, mostly CSX freights headed north to Baltimore or Hagerstown, or south to Richmond. It also sees a lot of passenger traffic from Amtrak and VRE.
Cell phone photo, aspect a bit off from 16x9 to get the truss to fit and to crop some extraneous Metro bridge distraction; closer to 18x9.
(A3A208)
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