Mexico's Bridges: Puente Atenquique I (1)

Rio Atenquique is quite meandering, and so about a mile north of the Puente Atenquique II it crosses under Puente Atenquique I.

I don't know why the sign for Puente Atenquique I shows a segmentally-constructed bridge with haunched girders. Most likely, the sign painter wasn't that knowledgeable about bridges. However, it's actually another incrementally-launched bridge like Puente Atenquique II. It only has seven spans though. It's a 320 m (1050 ft) long bridge, 75 m (246 ft) above the river, and with a 10.5 m (34.5 ft) wide deck.

Note the enormous road cut at back of this photo. Puente Atenquique is just beyond the cut. We have seen that the engineers who designed Route 54D always cut the top of the rise and then build a bridge over the subsequent valley. This makes the highway a little easier to drive, especially for someone (like me) who drives a Prius.

Mexico's Bridges: Puente Atenquique I (1) by Mark Yashinsky is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.