“A Bridge Too Far”

Guest post by Frederick Manfred Simon.

March 25, 2017

The annals of Milwaukee Road history are voluminous, even hyperbolic on its rise, heyday and eventual demise, and even today, a hundred-years-on, the mystique of The Milwaukee still lives. Just outside of Lind, Washington one can still “see” standing, like a stoic wraith, the iconic concrete abutments of the 833’ deckless span, and there, pay homage to the great, gone-but-not-forgotten, latent westward comer. By the 80’s, its vicissitudes too many and too heavy to carry, the Road, in a desperate fit of self-preservation, amputated its atrophying Pacific limb to no avail eventually and quite imminently dying a mutilated and agonizing septuagenarian death. On this homage with my son Alexander, two BNSF trains meet “under” what is left a bridge too far: one of many along the once proud Route of the Hiawatha and Olympian.