Last winter, Aaron and I were driving west on I-70 between Kansas City and Lawrence, and off to the north, we saw a fair-sized steel truss way off barely visible through bare trees and farm fields. We said at the time that it would be fun to track it down and look at it. I'm teaching Structural Analysis this semester, and I've been trying to assign "ill-defined", practical, structural engineering problems. So, it seemed like a good opportunity to track this bridge down and take a bunch of photos. Since we'd actually seen it from a distance at one point, it was pretty easy to track down with Google maps (satellite view is awesome for stuff like this).We drove out to Leavenworth County, KS this afternoon, about 20 minutes from home, and found this awesome pin-connected, dicrepit steel Pratt truss over Stranger Creek. Actually, it's a really cool bridge - I couldn't have found one better to assign for class if I'd tried. I love the eyebars and pin connections everywhere. It's pretty unusual to find a bridge with the eyebar bottom chord like this one. OK, honestly, I have no idea if it's unusual or not, but I'm sure that I haven't had the opportunity to crawl around one before, so therefore, it was pretty neat to me. :-) The bridge is actually pretty long for how light it seems (approx. 140').
We were out there for about an hour taking photos and enjoying the great weather, and a total of two vehicles drove over the bridge. That wasn't too surprising I guess, the route to get to this bridge consisted of gravel roads that seemed like they should have been located in some 3rd world country... I'm pretty sure the bridge sees traffic only from farmers... and geeks.
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