Tucumcari, New Mexico
The Rio Puerco Bridge on Historic Route 66.
Today was a novel day. I got a few miles in on what is now cited as Historic Route 66. Many exits on I-40 have signage to that effect, but most often, the start of the route itself is nowhere to be found. Without having pre-prepped routing independently, I either wound up on wrong choices or kept getting shunted back to the Interstate. Whatever. The Rio Puerco bridge you see above came to be in 1934 and became a late alignment of Route 66 in 1937. (Parts of Route 66 changed continually since its start in the 1920s as various pavements were upgraded to handle the traffic. In some cases, paved roads replaced dirt roads.)
Looks like a single lane bridge by today’s standards, doesn’t it?
This bridge is one of the longest single span steel truss bridges (250 feet) built in New Mexico, the result of an effort to avoid using a center truss in the river bed. The Rio Puerco is one of those rivers that had (has?) floods violent enough to cause bad erosion, and it had a penchant for collapsing every Read more…
Strolling Amok 