I’m trying to get back into photography, so when I saw fog over the water by my house I decided to run into town and try my luck. I was particularly interested in the railroad bridge project, as I’ve seen them preparing to remove the eastern span. I did manage to find some nice photos.

I would really like to see them whip out some BA wrenches and undo these nuts. I don’t know what they did with these on the middle span, so I really am curious about what they do with them.

Good timing – they’ve begun. Pretty soon there won’t be any gorgeous steel spans adorning this section of the Missouri River.

Here’s something I haven’t seen anyone else point out yet: this steel on this bridge is very, very special. You see, it was produced before the first nuclear weapon was detonated. That means no nuclear material, even trace material, was mixed into the steel when it was produced. Depending on who you are, this can be incredibly important to you…and this kind of steel is hard to come by these days. As a result, “Pre-War Steel” can bring a price many times higher than regular salvage steel. So what you see on that barge is an enormous chunk of money.

The street value of this span is probably more than I can guess. It’ll be sad when this old bridge is gone, but once the decision to put a new bridge here was made, I didn’t support hanging onto the bridge. If you ask why, I’ll tell you. For now, I guess it’ll be interesting to see it come apart piece by valuable piece.