Calaveras County, California Bridges; Cement Plant Road Bridge across Calaveritas Road

June 2013 (38.15889 Degrees, -120.61246 Degrees) Cement Plant Road Bridge

Readers may recall the iconic Cement Plant Road Bridge across State Route 49 from an earlier blog.  Cement Plant Road becomes a surface road a little east of the Golden Chain Highway but becomes a timber trestle bridge again to cross over Calaveritas Road (two miles to the east). Two miles further to the east Cement Plant Road reaches a dead end by an old quarry. My feeling is that this road used to be a railroad spur, maybe to a railway yard in the town of San Andreas. For some reason these old timber trestles provide a way for local traffic to drive over a busy highway and a much less busy road.

These trestles look a lot like the timber falsework we build to support concrete forms for bridge construction. They are only designed for a small lateral force, so it is fortunate that they haven't been knocked down by an earthquake. Of course, railroad engineers like to say that the large impact forces of a locomotive make these bridges less vulnerable to ground shaking.

Calaveras County, California Bridges; Cement Plant Road Bridge across Calaveritas Road by Mark Yashinsky is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.