Talk:List of crossings of the Upper Mississippi River

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List of crossings[edit]

I created this list to potentially help create stubs on the crossings. The lat and longs are all from USGS aerial photos or topos using USA Photomaps. I had to use some creativity on naming some of the bridges, especially the ones in Minnesota. If you are from Minnesota and know the official name, please feel free to update it and create a stub page with that name. Additionally, it is not quite complete between the Lake Itasca and the Twin Cities. --Dual Freq 01:49, 8 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Bridge Names[edit]

Not to discredit the source material, but it kind of bothered me that the "Climbing the Mississippi River Bridge by Bridge" ISBN 0964451808 book shows the Muscatine, IA bridge with the name of Norbert Becky Bridge instead of Norbert Beckey Bridge. It probably was a typo, but it kind of raises some questions. As for the La Crosse bridge, I would prefer a name less verbose than La Crosse-La Crescent Canadian Pacific Railroad bridge. 1870's materials about the bridge simply call it the "Bridge Over the Mississippi River at La Crosse"[1]. It looks like that includes all 4 bridges, Main Channel, East channel, French Slough and the span over the Black River. I'd say a single article would be acceptable covering all four bridges and calling it something like La Crosse Rail Bridge. There is only one rail crossing at La Crosse, so I don't know that the name needs to be too descriptive to include owner, channel etc. --Dual Freq 23:11, 29 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Yeah, I agree that the name is a bit cumbersome. Then again, it could have been La Crosse-La Crescent Canadian Pacific Railroad, Formerly Milwaukee Road, Main Channel (the one with more water under it) Swing Bridge, Constructed in 1872 With Two Steel Rails Spaced Four Feet, Eight and One-Half Inches Apart. I'm not totally sure that Mary Costello has all the bridge names 100% correct. I'm not even sure that railroads have official names for their bridges. It wouldn't hurt my feelings to rename it. (As an aside, that's an interesting link -- you might want to add it to La Crosse-La Crescent Canadian Pacific Railroad, Main Channel Bridge or whatever the shorter name should be.) --Elkman - (talk) 23:36, 29 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I'm certainly not the arbiter of bridge names, so I probably won't be changing it. I found another interesting LOC record, HAER NE-2. Yes, I know it says Nebraska, but there are 500 data pages detailing some of the bridges of the Mississippi, Ohio and Missouri, including the Winona Rail Bridge, now demolished. They go into serious detail, how many pounds of steel, heights of pillars and depths of caissons, span lengths, etc. The names are pretty bland in there too, but I guess in the 1860s if you call a bridge the Kansas City Bridge and there are no other bridges over the Missouri River at the time, then it's not too confusing. Rail Pictures has some bridge pictures, probably can't use them on Wikipedia, but still interesting. I typed in La Crosse bridge as a keyword search and it gave 3 pages of pictures. Including pictures of the swing span replacement on the Black River bridge. They replaced the swing span with a bascule span. Kind of neat. --Dual Freq 00:08, 30 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I changed it to La Crosse Rail Bridge. I don't know what's official, either, but the long name was almost as long as the bridge itself. --Elkman - (talk) 00:11, 30 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Additional information[edit]

I did a study of the Mississippi rail bridges, but I'm not sure it adds anything to this fine effort. http://www.trains.com/TRC/CS/forums/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=535712 Dale Qualicum 21:07, 2 September 2007 (UTC)[reply]


I think that's one of the sources I used. The Keithsburg Rail Bridge certainly had its roots in trains.com. Thank you. --Dual Freq 04:09, 23 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Ferries[edit]

I always get messed up with Wiki tables.

There are four ferries between Illinois and Missouri that should be on this list.

I will post the St. Genevieve article as soon as it is properly placed here.

Americasroof 03:14, 5 April 2007 (UTC)[reply]

If we're adding ferries, there is also the Casseville Ferry between Iowa and Wisconsin. I have some information and pictures about this one. Normally I'm trying to limit my efforts to Minnesota, but it looks like a few of the northern Iowa articles could use some work too. Mdcastle 14:22, 28 April 2007 (UTC)[reply]

An article for every bridge?[edit]

Is the eventual goal to have an article for every Mississippi River Bridge? I understand how being on the Missississippi can make them by "encyclopedic", but on the other hand, above St. Cloud in general and above Brainerd in especially they tend to be short, nondescript girder bridges. Finding sources could also be problematic as no one really bothers to write about them aside from Mr. Weeks' web page and the "Climbing the Mississippi" book. Mdcastle 14:22, 28 April 2007 (UTC)[reply]

I'm considering taking out all the links to non-existent bridge articles above St. Cloud; any objections to that? As stated, these are pretty nondescript bridges. Of course they could always be re-added if an article is written. OakGust00 (talk) 19:56, 20 March 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Probably not a bad idea to get rid of the red links. You might want to check the two sources mentioned above (John Weeks, and "Climbing the Mississippi") and see if any of them are plausible enough to be kept per WP:REDDEAL. Mojoworker (talk) 22:10, 20 March 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks for the suggestions; likely should keep a few (esp. rail bridges and dams, which tend to have more historical significance). OakGust00 (talk) 18:04, 26 March 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Sauk Rapids Bridge undo[edit]

I undid 208.54.95.70's couple edits, as I've seen first-hand crews taking down the old bridge. I haven't been by the bridge for a couple weeks, but last time I've been out there they had most of the road deck taken down already. Plus, since the new bridge has opened, the old bridge has been barricaded so the public is unable to cross.

If 208.54.95.70 has a source about the bridge being "turned back" to Benton County, please tell me on my talk page or here. Actually, I believe the old bridge was under jurisdiction of Stearns and Benton County anyways since the opening of the Bridge of Hope, if that's the case, maybe that should be fixed in the Sauk Rapids Bridge article (it currently says Minnesota Department of Transportation in the Maintained By header)

SpaceJunkie (talk) 03:50, 16 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Adding/Editing Coords, etc[edit]

My edit to this "List of crossings of the Upper Mississippi River" is not only my first edit to this Wikipedia article, it is my first Wikipedia edit period!

If this edit works properly, I will

1) add coords for all the bridges that don't yet have values -- perhaps 20 or so.

2) correct positions for 4 or 5 bridges (at least one bridge now plots a few hundred miles away).

3) If there are no objections, I will also edit ALL the coords to convert them to WGS-84 with a precision of 1/100ths of a second -- this will insure the bridges plot properly in Google Earth and other satellite imagery programs.

4) Again, if there are no objections, I will add about 4 or 5 bridges (currently existing or historical) -- the source for the existing bridges being satellite imagery and for the historic bridges it is online USGS Topo maps.

Randyhi (talk) 15:50, 1 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Welcome. I would recommend against going to that level of precision. I deliberately only used seconds when I made the article, and even then I felt like I was making a list of targets and not a list of bridges. Seconds is adequate to describe the location of most things and I think there is a WP:Manual of Style ref somewhere that indicates that as well. And I think you mean WGS-84. If there are errors of several miles then it must have been a typo, feel free to correct those. Also remember that not all maps are properly gridlocked and the additional precision may just be extra precise on the wrong spot. I've seen terraserver images off by quite a bit because of this. Thanks for your help. --Dual Freq (talk) 15:54, 1 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Wow! That was fast! 4 minutes! I'm very impressed! Thank you for your comments. Thank you also for the list! I can't tell you how useful it was! Yes, I meant WGS-84. Most of the misplots were typical typos. The hundreds of miles one resulted from cutting and pasting the coord above but then editing only the minutes and seconds not noticing the latitude had changed from 94 to 93 degrees. Precision: I noticed you gave tenths in some places and even hundreths in at least one so I wasnt sure. I also feel most people will choose either google maps or google earth when they click on the coordinates and I found it disconcerting when the "green arrow" pointed somewhere other than at the bridge. The only way to avoid this is to use increased precision. For example, at the latitude of northern Minnesota a half-second of longitude is 35 feet on the ground - more than the half-width of the bridges up there. However, as a professional surveyor, I may be hung up with precision as we routinely work to a few 100,000ths of a second! How about my 4th task - adding the additional visible and historic bridges? Good idea? Happy New Year!

Randyhi (talk) 17:52, 1 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Precision: The only reference I could find in the style manual was "Unnecessary vagueness... Use accurate measurements whenever possible." (There was also lots of discussion about the importance of consistency.) Still, it would be wasteful to specify more precision than GeoHack uses. GeoHack converts all input formats to 6 decimal place degrees, e.g., 94d 38' 35.40" = 94.643167d and 94d 38' 35.41" = 94.643169d. By varying input by 1/100th of a second, output changed by 0.00002d so his program utilizes the full precision of inputting 100ths of a second. Still, as author of this wonderfully useful list, it is your call -- I am happy to defer to your final decision to either live with seconds or edit them to 10ths or 100ths.

Another area I would like to help is correcting the broken links for many of the northern bridges -- if you can show me how to fix one of them, I can follow the pattern to fix the others. Or, if the links point to non-existing documents, perhaps they should just be removed until stubs can be prepared.

Randyhi (talk) 17:52, 1 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

A number of people contributed to the list and it certainly is not my call how it is maintained. I did stat the list a few years ago, and I didn't add more precision because I didn't want to provide a targeting list for somebody's cruise missiles 30 years from now. Still, if you'd like to add more detail, that's fine. I'm sure if someone wanted to create a target list then they could use Google maps to make one themselves, I know it's silly, but I didn't want it on my conscience. As for the red links, most that remain are relatively insignificant bridges that cross the Mississippi River when it is fairly narrow in northern Minnesota. We left the red links for future use, but I doubt those will ever have their own articles and most have very debatable or arbitrary names in this list. --Dual Freq (talk) 23:11, 1 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Wow again! You are an excellent "overseer" -- thanks for the prompt replies. Thanks also for the help, advice, guidance and patience you have shown this absolutely rank newcomer to Wikipedia. I should have emphasized earlier that my concerns are limited to the small upper bridges and the list is excellent from Sauk Rapids on. Thanks also for your explanation of the "red links." My "thank you" will be to edit the identified mis-plots.

Randyhi (talk) 04:05, 2 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Former bridge in Minneapolis[edit]

Did the Minneapolis Western Railway bridge, between the Stone Arch and I-35W bridges, have a name? --NE2 08:27, 28 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

I checked two books (Minneapolis and the Age of Railways by Don L. Hofsommer and Wood, Concrete, Stone, and Steel by Denis Gardner) and there's no formal name for the bridges, other than the Minneapolis Western Railway bridge. That bridge was built in 1885 and demolished in 1952. The Minneapolis Western Railway was incorporated to serve mills and manufacturing plants on the west side of the Mississippi, and it competed with the Minneapolis and St. Louis Railway for that traffic. It was essentially a thinly-veiled puppet of the Minneapolis, St. Paul & Manitoba, later the Great Northern Railway.
There was also a Tenth Avenue Bridge in Minneapolis, built in 1874 and demolished in 1942, that was used by wagons and pedestrians. It connected Tenth Avenue S. on the west bank with Sixth Avenue SE on the east bank. There's still one stone pier visible in the river just downstream of the Stone Arch Bridge. I saw a map that labels it the "Lower Bridge", but it may have been more commonly known as the Tenth Avenue Bridge. --Elkman (Elkspeak) 13:38, 28 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Digressing, the M&StL actually had a subsidiary, the Railway Transfer Company of the City of Minneapolis, that operated local service in the area. The M&StL main line ended at 20th Avenue South, where the original NP line through the University of Minnesota (including another former river bridge) began. The realignment including Northern Pacific Bridge Number 9 began just west of this change in ownership.
A third company, the Minneapolis Eastern Railway, also served the area, and was jointly controlled by the C&NW and Milwaukee. --NE2 13:55, 28 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Powerline crossings[edit]

Please add also powerline crossngs of Mississippi. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Jodolindu (talk • contribs) 21:58, 26 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

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