Real Masonry Arches (bridges, mostly)

Arlington

Arlington

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Can you name some real masonry arch bridges in/near Boston, particularly ones that you can walk under? No poured concrete, please.
Trying to arrange a field trip for the kids (ok, me)

There's the 1876 Echo Bridge, in Newton which is probably the leading candidate

Sorry the Canton Viaduct, to me, just looks like a big wall with fakey arches* desipite its 187 years.

And this thin, wide, and horizontal span that carries Boston Ave over the Mystic on the Medford-Somerville border...only problem is you need a kayak to get under it. Can't tell when it was built (1895?) but from underneath the arch is so shallow it seems horizontal


* you wanna real "open arch" 1830s Viaduct, you gotta go to Maryland & the B&O's 1833 - 1835 Thomas Viaduct (and on a curve, no less)
 
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South St., Roslindale under Needham Line to the Arboretum. Built that way because it was the site of the 1887 Bussey Bridge Disaster where an incompetently-designed iron truss bridge collapsed under a Boston & Providence commuter train killing 38. The replacement span was stupendously overdesigned as a stone arch to reinstill public confidence after the fallout from the disaster flagged dozens of similar spans as ticking time bombs and exposed endemic corruption in the bridge-building industry, resulting in a new era of civil engineering standards reform.

Bridge is festooned with a memorial plaque to the victims of the disaster.
 
Longwood Avenue Bridge over the muddy river - 1896
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If you don't mind coming all the way out to Holliston there are several stone arch bridges accessible from the rail trail.

There's the 8 arches of the Bogastow Brook Viaduct off of Woodland Street (google maps).
Arch Street Bridge on Arch Street. Not sure if this is a public way, but you could access the bridge from the trail (google maps).
And the Phipps Tunnel which goes under Highland Street. Amazingly trains used to pass through here.
 
Worcester Line over Charles River, Newton. Original quad-track construction with derelict platforms for former B&A Riverside mainline station (accessed from walled-off underpass @ Charles St. dead-end) abutting it on the east shore.

Very hard to get a decent look at unless you're on one of the adjacent Riverside Park footbridges.

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Downtown Brockton RR arches: 6 of them, plus Brockton Station/Police Dept. stone massing, plus one unused arch in the approach to the old downtown freight yard. All from an enormous late-1890's mass grade separation of the Old Colony main through Downtown, and all beautifully restored in '96 in prep for commuter rail reactivation. All of the street-overpass arches have unique acoustics near their inner midpoints where you can have a private conversation with a friend on the opposite sidewalk while cars are loudly blowing by.
 
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Franklin Park has the Ellicott Arch, which carries Circuit Drive over the footpaths below. It's also close by to the Overlook and Schoolmaster Hill ruins, which are rad.
 
Fitchburg Line bridge in Belmont, built 1908

This little pedestrian underpass at Arboretum Road, near Bussey Bridge

The massive arch carrying the Fairmount Line over Hyde Park Avenue at Readville is quite impressive. Paul's Bridge is not far to the east.

The Emerald Necklace has a number of neat spans. Longwood Avenue and Ellicott were already mentioned; others include the Boylston Street bridge, the Fens Bridge (Park Drive), two footbridges at Short Street, Netherlands Road footbridge, Netherlands Road bridge, Brookline Avenue bridge and nearby footbridge, River Road bridge, Route 9 with honorable mention Jamaicaway, Leverett Pond, Willow Pond Road, Circuit Drive, and the Scarboro Pond footbridge. (Some might be faced with brick, but most are true masonry.)

There are some others, mostly road and aqueduct, in the Metrowest area. Further from Boston, but worth the visit if you're in the area, are the Middlefield–Becket Stone Arch Railroad Bridge District and the Central Massachusetts Railroad arch at the Wachusett Reservoir. Rhode Island has a brick-faced double arch in East Providence, and a double arch and single arch in East Greenwich - the latter pair dating from the line's 1837 construction.
 
Greendale Ave., Needham (a.k.a. original 1927 Route 128 mainline) over the Needham Line. Visible for about a nanosecond on 128S via the power line ROW abutting the rail overpass now that fall foliage has cleared out a bit.

Bridge date-stamped 1932, but that may have been a subsequent widening for 128. The arch may date to the Needham Cutoff's 1911 construction when then- rural town road Greendale was grade separated over the brand new rail ROW.
 
Are there any examples of recently built masonry arches? I figure everything would be concrete these days, but sometimes you can be surprised.
 
THis one, In Merrimack NH was as recent as 1921.
I think we learned in the Beton Brut thread that somewhere in the 1910s t there was a tech breakthrough in making things out of concrete (e.g Tunkahnnock Viaduct) (among them, the truck-mounted cement mixer), that slowly took over the world, arriving last in places like NH that had plenty of Granite and the knowhow to use it, so that the Wachussett dam (1907) is granite but the Hoover Dam (late 1920s- early 30s)is concrete?

Chamberlain Bridge - Merrimack, NH - Arch Bridges on Waymarking.com

Waymarking.com is a way to mark unique locations on the planet and give them a voice. While GPS technology allows us to pinpoint any location on the planet, mark the location, and share it with others, Waymarking is the toolset for categorizing and adding unique information for that location.
www.waymarking.com www.waymarking.com
 
ceo said:
There's an old stone arch bridge in Westford on the otherwise almost completely obliterated Nashua, Acton and Boston route. https://goo.gl/maps/X2Jwjc7P7DVzSXoh9
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I had forgotten all about that. My cousins lived in the Cape style house opposite Daniel Drive, the second house up from the auto body shop (interesting side note: they ran a variety store out of the front part in the 1970s called Graniteville Package and Variety, which later became an antique shop called Secondhand Joe's (after my uncle Joe). When they closed the store, they converted it into a living and dining room (they had six kids, so they needed the space), but they left the built in the wall beer chest (it dated from the 1920s or 30s, I think), so there were ~2'x2' square wood and glass refrigerator chest doors in the wall of their dining room). The wooded area behind the houses there was more of a field in the 1980s, and my siblings and cousins and I would go back and explore around the tracks, hoping that a train would pass, or we would explore the abandoned line that passed over it-there are the remnants of the abutment over the existing tracks and the stone arch bridge a few hundred feet away. Per my late aunt Fran, that was line called by locals the "Old Red Line" because it never made a profit and always ran in the red. Strangely our parents warned us not to climb on the bridge abutments or a nearby signal tower, but had no qualms about us playing on the railroad tracks. I guess their laissez-faire parenting style (I'm number six of eight kids myself, so they were probably pretty burned out by the time I came of age) trusted us to not get hit by loud slow-moving freight trains, but didn't trust us to not to fall off a bridge abutment.
 
Roxxma said:
I had forgotten all about that. My cousins lived in the Cape style house opposite Daniel Drive, the second house up from the auto body shop (interesting side note: they ran a variety store out of the front part in the 1970s called Graniteville Package and Variety, which later became an antique shop called Secondhand Joe's (after my uncle Joe). When they closed the store, they converted it into a living and dining room (they had six kids, so they needed the space), but they left the built in the wall beer chest (it dated from the 1920s or 30s, I think), so there were ~2'x2' square wood and glass refrigerator chest doors in the wall of their dining room). The wooded area behind the houses there was more of a field in the 1980s, and my siblings and cousins and I would go back and explore around the tracks, hoping that a train would pass, or we would explore the abandoned line that passed over it-there are the remnants of the abutment over the existing tracks and the stone arch bridge a few hundred feet away. Per my late aunt Fran, that was line called by locals the "Old Red Line" because it never made a profit and always ran in the red. Strangely our parents warned us not to climb on the bridge abutments or a nearby signal tower, but had no qualms about us playing on the railroad tracks. I guess their laissez-faire parenting style (I'm number six of eight kids myself, so they were probably pretty burned out by the time I came of age) trusted us to not get hit by loud slow-moving freight trains, but didn't trust us to not to fall off a bridge abutment.
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Yeah...Nashua, Acton & Boston was some investor's acid dream of a competitive express route to Boston in the Wild West of 1870's RR speculation. Forked off the (also-abandoned) Worcester, Nashua, and Portland a few blocks SW of Union Station in Nashua (Temple & E. Hollis St.'s)...skipped every single populated area to the south, then joined with the Framingham & Lowell just north of West Concord Station on the segment of that north-south line that was active until 1992. The "Boston" part of the name was supposed to be some speculative alliancing with a present-day east-west commuter line...until every potential linkup turned its nose from them wanting nothing to do with the biz prospects of such a hopelessly rural route. I think the original investors had their sights ultimately set on an Old Colony (owner of the Framingham & Lowell) + Boston & Albany joint for completing the one-seat trip. When the alliances never materialized, it just became a Nashua-West Concord short run with forced-transfer to the Fitchburg, which enticed absolutely no one...and some incredibly sparse freight interchanging at the junctions.

Thus, the NA&B ended up with the distinction of being the gimpiest folly in all of New England getting passed from one creditor to another. It ended up carrying little more than agricultural product from the dying agrarian sector of New England for 40 years until Boston & Maine started tearing it up for scrap...in the early-1920's, the all-time "peak profit" decade for corporate RR's. That's how lost a cause it was.

Ironically those stone arches were its biggest historical distinction. Most roads of pre-1885 age were still built with largely wood/tin trestles...maybe some scattered wrought-iron...for Civil War-era lightweight wood rolling stock. The NA&B was an extremely early adopter of high weight ratings in anticipation of the heavyweight steel cars yet to come, hence the copious use of stone arches at major crossings. For the most part the rest of the industry waited until about 1890 to mass-uprate (at inflation-adjusted cost of tens of billions) its loading capacity with an enormous burst of bridge reconstruction. So ironically it was future-proofed for the very steel heavyweight cars that almost never ended up running on it because it was such a sparse and unprofitable route it always got someone's old wood 'sloppy seconds'. B&M probably held their nose and absorbed it in the end for its scrap value...most of that steel and stone recycled elsewhere on the system.
 
There's a stretch of the NAB that's still visible, from Vine Brook Rd in Westford to the lumberyard in Acton that was the Framingham & Lowell's last customer. I rode down that way on a bike ride a few years ago, it was only sort-of rideable and ended in a high chain-link fence where the (then under construction) Bruce Freeman Rail Trail skirts around the lumberyard. Had to bushwack around and fortunately found a gap in the fence at the northwest corner of NARA Park. Might make a nice branch off the BFRT, though I expect the residents of Vine Brook Rd and the local equestrians would hate the idea. https://goo.gl/maps/V1KSM7yoa78wdXia9
 
stick n move said:
Are there any examples of recently built masonry arches? I figure everything would be concrete these days, but sometimes you can be surprised.
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What is done now is a reinforced concrete core with a real stone masonry veneer several inches thick anchored to the concrete face. So it looks like solid masonry but actually isn't. I've designed those for vertical surfaces only (walls, abutments, etc.).
 
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