New Cape Cod Bridges

DominusNovus said:
Why not?

I wasn’t thinking so much about the span but the height. As an active shipping canal, it seems to me that it would be more convenient for ships, especially with the rail bridge being a lift bridge.

I just figure someone must have done a study on the topic, at least for the rail bridge, right?
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Canal widening, the two road bridges, and the rail bridge were all simultaneously planned and constructed under the direction of the Army Corps. All three bridges are 1933-35 jobs. Whatever studying was done was wholesale, since the very act of widening the canal nuked all pre-existing bridges at once. The rail bridge had to be movable as there's no way climbing grades would've worked to the same height as the fixed road spans. No tunnel was studied instead because while canal widening went quick the dredging work to deepen it continued through 1940.
 
F-Line to Dudley said:
Canal widening, the two road bridges, and the rail bridge were all simultaneously planned and constructed under the direction of the Army Corps. All three bridges are 1933-35 jobs. Whatever studying was done was wholesale, since the very act of widening the canal nuked all pre-existing bridges at once. The rail bridge had to be movable as there's no way climbing grades would've worked to the same height as the fixed road spans. No tunnel was studied instead because while canal widening went quick the dredging work to deepen it continued through 1940.
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Thanks, that pretty much answers the question. In theory, would a rail tunnel make sense as a replacement, especially if there were ever to be regular commuter service to the cape?
 
DominusNovus said:
Thanks, that pretty much answers the question. In theory, would a rail tunnel make sense as a replacement, especially if there were ever to be regular commuter service to the cape?
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No. The tippy-top maximum possible train frequencies on-Cape are too small, the maritime traffic isn't all that heavy, and the bridge was expensively rehabbed not 18 years ago to full state-of-repair.

The Canal is 32 feet deep; you'd need 2/3 mile's worth of descent grading on each side to put it in tunnel for all of 600 feet. That's prohibitive amount of cost/labor and waterproofing for the task. You'd also instantaneously have to sacrifice any facsimile of the Buzzards Bay stop and all the ridership it generates to start the inclines way further out. This isn't Metro North where it's hard to schedule any bridge openings; the surrounding environment makes lift bridge the dead-simplest of all solutions.


Why does there have to be a tunnel here??? What hammer is in such desperate search of nails that this is a thing that needs to be made happen?
 
> the Canal is 32 feet deep

wow ... that severely limits container ship traffic. I have seen medium size cruise ships pass through there but with a max of 32 feet, you're not going to see anything that a deep draft. I'm not sure how much the tides influence that.
 
citydweller said:
> the Canal is 32 feet deep

wow ... that severely limits container ship traffic. I have seen medium size cruise ships pass through there but with a max of 32 feet, you're not going to see anything that a deep draft. I'm not sure how much the tides influence that.
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Right. It was deepened for Wartime so 1940-size merchant ships could take the safe route through the bay instead of getting sunk by German U-boats that were known to be right there in international waters out in the open Atlantic. Absent that there wasn't much of an economic case for deepening it further because most big cargo isn't time-sensitive enough to bother. So neither rail nor ship mode schedules exert much pressure at all on the lift bridge. It's mostly un-dense pleasure and military traffic to this day.
 
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