Starrucca Viaduct is a stone

arch bridge An arch bridge is a bridge with abutments at each end shaped as a curved arch. Arch bridges work by transferring the weight of the bridge and its structural load, loads partially into a horizontal thrust restrained by the abutments at either si ...

that spans Starrucca Creek near

Lanesboro, Pennsylvania Lanesboro is a borough in Susquehanna County, Pennsylvania, United States. The population was 485 at the 2020 census. History Lanesboro was named for Martin Lane, an early settler who first called it Lanesville. The name was changed to Lanes ...

, in the United States. Completed in 1848 at a cost of $320,000 (equal to $ today), it was at the time the world's largest stone railway viaduct and was thought to be the most expensive railway bridge as well. Still in use, the viaduct is listed on the

National Register of Historic Places The National Register of Historic Places (NRHP) is the Federal government of the United States, United States federal government's official United States National Register of Historic Places listings, list of sites, buildings, structures, Hist ...

and is designated as a

National Historic Civil Engineering Landmark __NOTOC__ The following is a list of Historic Civil Engineering Landmarks as designated by the American Society of Civil Engineers since it began the program in 1964. The designation is granted to projects, structures, and sites in the United Stat ...

History

19th century

The

viaduct A viaduct is a specific type of bridge that consists of a series of arches, piers or columns supporting a long elevated railway or road. Typically a viaduct connects two points of roughly equal elevation, allowing direct overpass across a wide ...

was designed by Julius W. Adams and James P. Kirkwood and built in 1847–48 by the

New York and Erie Railroad The Erie Railroad was a railroad that operated in the Northeastern United States, originally connecting Pavonia Terminal in Jersey City, New Jersey, with Lake Erie at Dunkirk, New York. The railroad expanded west to Chicago following its 1865 ...

, of locally-quarried random

ashlar Ashlar () is a cut and dressed rock (geology), stone, worked using a chisel to achieve a specific form, typically rectangular in shape. The term can also refer to a structure built from such stones. Ashlar is the finest stone masonry unit, a ...

bluestone Bluestone is a cultural or commercial name for a number of natural dimension stone, dimension or building stone varieties, including: * basalt in Victoria (Australia), Victoria, Australia, and in New Zealand * diabase, dolerites in Tasmania, ...

, except for three brick interior longitudinal

spandrel A spandrel is a roughly triangular space, usually found in pairs, between the top of an arch and a rectangular frame, between the tops of two adjacent arches, or one of the four spaces between a circle within a square. They are frequently fil ...

walls and the concrete bases of the piers. This may have been the first structural use of concrete in American bridge construction. It was built to solve an engineering problem posed by the wide valley of Starrucca Creek. The railroad considered building an embankment, but abandoned the idea as impractical. The Erie Railroad was well-financed by British investors but, even with money available, most American contractors at the time were incapable of the task. Julius W. Adams, the superintending engineer of construction in the area, hired James P. Kirkwood, a civil engineer who had worked on the

Long Island Rail Road The Long Island Rail Road , or LIRR, is a Rail transport, railroad in the southeastern part of the U.S. state of New York (state), New York, stretching from Manhattan to the eastern tip of Suffolk County, New York, Suffolk County on Long Islan ...

. Accounts differ as to whether Kirkwood worked on the bridge himself, or whether Adams was responsible for the plans with Kirkwood working as a subordinate. The lead stonemason, Thomas Heavey, an Irish immigrant from County Offaly, worked on other projects for Kirkwood, primarily in New England. It took 800 workers, each paid about $1 per day, equal to $ today, to complete the bridge in a year. The

falsework Falsework consists of temporary structures used in construction to support a permanent structure until its construction is sufficiently advanced to support itself. For arches, this is specifically called centering. Falsework includes temporary ...

for the bridge required more than half a million feet of cord and hewn timbers. The original single

broad gauge A broad-gauge railway is a railway with a track gauge (the distance between the rails) broader than the used by standard-gauge railways. Broad gauge of , more known as Russian gauge, is the dominant track gauge in former Soviet Union countries ...

track was replaced by two

standard gauge A standard-gauge railway is a railway with a track gauge of . The standard gauge is also called Stephenson gauge (after George Stephenson), international gauge, UIC gauge, uniform gauge, normal gauge in Europe, and SGR in East Africa. It is the ...

tracks in 1886. The roadbed deck under the tracks was reinforced with a layer of concrete in 1958. The bridge has been in continuous use for more than a century and a half.

20th century

The viaduct was designated as a

by the

American Society of Civil Engineers The American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) is a tax-exempt professional body founded in 1852 to represent members of the civil engineering profession worldwide. Headquartered in Reston, Virginia, it is the oldest national engineering soci ...

in 1973 and was listed on the

in 1975.

21st century

In 2005, the

Norfolk Southern Railway The Norfolk Southern Railway is a Class I freight railroad operating in the Eastern United States. Headquartered in Atlanta, the company was formed in 1982 with the merger of the Norfolk and Western Railway and Southern Railway. The comp ...

leased the portion of the line from

Port Jervis Port Jervis, named after John Bloomfield Jervis, a Roman civil engineer who oversaw the construction of the Delaware and Hudson Canal, is a city located at the confluence of the Neversink and Delaware rivers in western Orange County, New York, ...

Binghamton, New York Binghamton ( ) is a city in the U.S. state of New York, and serves as the county seat of Broome County. Surrounded by rolling hills, it lies in the state's Southern Tier region near the Pennsylvania border, in a bowl-shaped valley at the c ...

to the Delaware Otsego Corporation, which operates it under the name Central New York Railway. The only railroad currently using it is Delaware Otsego's New York, Susquehanna and Western Railway. File:Jasper Francis Cropsey - Starrucca Viaduct, Pennsylvania - Google Art Project.jpg, ''Starruca Viaduct, Pennsylvania'', 1865, by Jasper Francis Cropsey File:Starrucca Viaduct reflected.jpg, October 2009 File:Starrucca Viaduct, Oct 2014.jpg, October 2014

References

* * * *American Society of Civil Engineers, Reston, VA
"Starrucca Viaduct."
Historic Civil Engineering Landmarks. Accessed 2022-01-26. * *

External links