Welcome to the Roadscapes Wednesday segment! Each week here on Geek Alabama, Roadscapes Wednesday will feature roads and infrastructure related topics. Geek Alabama Editor / Publisher Nathan Young is often called the “road geek” for a good reason, Nathan loves roads and loves talking about roads!
Today, driving across the Huey P. Long Bridge into New Orleans may feel ordinary. But for generations of Louisiana drivers, the old Huey was anything but ordinary. It was narrow, steep, loud, unforgiving, and unforgettable — with cars and trucks climbing the outside of the bridge while trains ran straight through the middle.
But the fear of the old crossing is only part of the story.
Long before it became one of the most white-knuckle drives in Louisiana, the Huey P. Long Bridge had already made history. When it opened in 1935, it became the first bridge to cross the Mississippi River in the state of Louisiana — a massive rail and highway crossing built high enough for ships, strong enough for trains, and heavy enough to force engineers to solve one of the hardest foundation problems in the Mississippi Delta.
This episode looks at how New Orleans’ river problem became an engineering problem, how Ralph Modjeski, Daniel Moran, and Karl Terzaghi helped shape the solution, how the bridge was founded in deep sand instead of bedrock, and how a Depression-era crossing eventually had to be widened while still carrying traffic, trains, and river commerce.
From the original 1935 construction to the nearly $1.2 billion widening completed in 2013, this is the story of a bridge that had to do the impossible not once, but twice.
Categories: Roadscapes Stuff
