The traffic engineers let me see the river. I can see the Statue of Liberty, Newark Airport, the skyline, all sorts of distracting stuff from bridges. But it seems that every time I’m on a bridge that crosses Railroad tracks, the bridge has a 6+ foot wall on each sides to prevent me from seeing the tracks below.
Am I imagining this? And if not, why won’t they let me see the choo-choo’s?
You are indeed imagining this. Please place this under your tongue. You will feel better shortly.
No, seriously, all I can imagine is that perhaps they fear people throwing stuff down at a train hustling down the track at 65 Mph??
Cartooniverse
Or maybe comitting suicide? What A mess
Just a WAG, but are the bridges with the impediments to vision newer bridges? Around here, all new bridges, overpasses, etc. - anything that offers any kind of view - wil have retaining walls that are built so that 1.) they’ll have half a chance of keeping an errant vehicle from going airborne, and 2.) they prevent ocupants of a vehicle from sightseeing as they traverse the structure.
[humor]
Manny, they don’t want undesirables like you to rappel over the bridge and catch a boxcar to Arizona. They want to keep them all in New York.
[/humor]
aiight…WAG, but it seems plausible…
other things you see are stationary. you see them, no big deal. trains on the other hand, have a nasty habit of moving. this could, and does, create an optical illusion, mainly, that you are moving in a direction that you aren’t. you think the train is stationary, and that you are moving in a weird ass direction, especially if the trains are perpendicular to you underneath. so the walls are there to you don’t run into a wall or other cars while you innocently glace at a moving train and overcompensate while driving.
The only tracks I’ve seen the solid barriers above are electrified tracks, since they just finished electrifying most of the Amtrak line heading by me. I was told that there were solid barriers on overpasses so that nothing tossed over the edge would land on the catenary wires, causing a short/fire, tripping the breaker for that section of the track. Seemed like a good enough reason for me…
Over electified tracks it’s so kids won’t try and dangle anything over the bridge and touch the wires. Sure, they know it’s dangerous, but some stupid kid will try it to see what happens. Maybe they’ll try and touch the wires with a tree branch just to see what happens.
I say let em’ touch the wires with a treebranch and let them learn a lesson…A VERY important lesson :evil laugh:
ubermensch that sounds like a darn good explanation to me. I hadn’t even thought of that.
Why not just put the six foot high barriers around the kids instead? That way we could watch the pretty trains from the bridge like God intended.
On a related note, the Golden Gate Bridge was designed so that you can only see the view effectively if you keep moving, so as not to impede traffic.
The views from bridges here aren’t blocked by walls, so I can see trains. Unfortunately, one day a bunch of idiots threw a treeish thing on the track, which caused trains to stop running for a few hours. Thats not fun when you rely on them.
Maybe where you live there are more treeish things (or more idiots).
manhattan, i used to live in the area you’re referencing. i remember about 10 years ago hearing that there was a rash of incidents where kids were tying cinder blocks to bridges and dropping them in front of oncoming trains and in one case may have killed a conductor (or engineer or whatever train drivers are called). sounds like an urban legend, but may have something to do with the walls.
It’s to stop you pissing off the bridge onto the electric wires to prove you don’t get electrocuted. I wasn’t, but maybe with a little more beer and effort I could get that stream continuous…
I wanna throw in $.02 behind **ubermensch[/s]'s theory. I always get a sense of being swept along (almost vertigo-like) when I’m walking across a pedestrian bridge over a busy highway. Seems to me the same thing might apply in vehicles at proportionately higher speeds.
Not that I wanna test it out or anything!
Thanks for the responses, all. I’m an especially big fan of the “protect the catenary” school, although “driver hypnosis” has a certain appeal.
The “protect the tracks” is certainly not without merit; it just seems that the walls are so much more universal on bridges over railroads than they are on bridges over roads. As beatle points out, virtually all new bridges have walls, either to prevent dithering by drivers or to discourage teen “pranks.”
The September 2000 issue of ‘Railfan & Railroad’ [Now, now, behave please] has a short blurb on just this topic, bemoaning the fencing appearing on new and upgraded bridges (as it intefers with photography). They stated it was because of federal regulations (but what regulations and which department mandated the regulations was unfortunately not specified).
However, the main gist of the story was that some municipalities realize the economic benefits from railfans, and on some newly-fenced bridges have added ‘camera ports’ (small, ~3x3in holes) in the fencing at certain viewing and photographic adages. Whether these are just holes or glass/plastic panes was not specified either.