Yuba County, California Bridges: Union Pacific Railroad Bridge across the Bear River

October 2013 (39.0000 Degrees, -121.4063 Degrees) UP Railroad Bridge

Today's bridge carries the Union Pacific Railway across the Bear River near Wheatland, California. The bridge is composed of steel trestle piers on concrete pier walls on the north (left) side of the river and concrete filled steel casings on the south side of the river.

The superstructure is steel I girders but at the south end of the bridge, the steel girders are replaced by precast concrete girders and the concrete-filled steel casings are replaced with steel trestle piers (see photo above).

Although aesthetics was probably the last thing on the engineer's mind while designing this bridge, it has a peculiar beauty. I particularly like the shape of the concrete river pier.

We are continuing an exploration of bridges in California counties that we began about a year ago. So far we've studied bridges in Placer, Nevada, El Dorado, Amador, Calaveras, Sacramento, Yolo, and now Yuba County (see map below). Since I seem to be dividing my time between bridges in California and Japan, so we'll see whether we finish Japan's 47 prefectures or California's 58 counties first.

Yuba County, California Bridges: Union Pacific Railroad Bridge across the Bear River by Mark Yashinsky is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.