Since I visited the site over a week ago before I went to Kansas City they did some more work on the previous pier replacement. They demolished a lot more of the old pier below where the old cofferdam patch came up to and put some cross bracing between the two sets of steel piles. In this image you can see one of the new piles they just sunk to hold a cable winch on the far left.
Russell, I'm wondering if those I-Beams in your second photo might not be temporary merely to get traffic flowing. That would give them a more relaxed period while they prepare and install a permanent foundation using those new and larger piles, the ones with the winches on top.....?????
From what I understand the first pier replacement was successful and is finished. All the work going on now is to replace the second pier farther out in the river. For the second pier, they are not using a platform like they built coming out from the river bank to hold the crane for setting piles and all so they will work from barges in the middle of the river held in place by the cable winches.
This is the rig they were using to drive the piles for the winches. You can see one of the uninstalled winches still on the deck. The tall pipes sticking up are "jack up" legs used when they have a more permanent work site. Those tow boats were pushing the barge all over the river setting piers so they never deployed the legs. I am not sure why they don't use the jack up feature instead of the cables down the road. Maybe they will winch the barges back and forth to the bank to pick up equipment and supplies? Just guessing here at this point.
I would put their infrastructure work up against anyone's. At various times I've been qualified on all or part of 10 UP subdivisions and have operated on other railroads' track and plant (besides my native BNSF). UP's track, structures and facilities are superior to those of BNSF in my opinion. Especially the track. In a situation like this there is an ongoing problem. Right now the only real course of action is to stabilize the bridge until it can be properly assessed. If it can be repaired properly I'm certain it will be done. If a replacement is called for, the best case scenario utilizes the existing bridge until the new one can be opened.
I found this old shot taken while on the bridge in the UP dome car Columbine. This was part of a Safety Awareness Train program on November 17, 2006. We rode from Sugar Land out to Flatonia and back. The river looks quit low then.
As I will be unable to visit the site for a while this will be the last post for me for a week or so. A lot going on and a lot of stuff to speculate, assume and guess about. They just finished unloading some pipe off of some rail cars when I showed up. The barges were all secured on the downstream side of the bridge. They had set a few of these frames around the old pier and seemed to be positioning them with the cable winches. I could not really tell where the cables went underwater though. They were driving the pier sections of pipe down through these frames into the sediment. Here they are welding more pipe on top to drive further down. Here is one of the winches with its cable deployed into the water going somewhere that I am not sure of. After dropping a length of pipe down one corner of a frame, they lower this yellow contraption on top of the pipe. It somehow drives the pipe down into the sediment without any visible pounding. Maybe it vibrates the pipe liquefying the mud under it? Here is an other view after it had driven a pipe down a bit. It was kind of behind a lot of other stuff so I could not get a good view of it. It looks like they are going to place one of the triple pipe frames with piles driven down through them off of each corner of the old pier. They will then frame in around them and possibly use them to jack up the spans in order to demolish the old pier. Then they will finish the actual support for the spans and lower them onto it. All this will make a very wide pier structure just like the first pier only much bulkier. This got me thinking that these could easily hold a double track bridge in the future. Maybe they are actually planning ahead. It has been assumed before all this flood damage that they were going to double track this anyway in the next few years or so.
I just got home from Virginia a few minutes ago. I will try to go look tomorrow and see what is up.....or down, as the case may be.
I did not get much railfanning in on this trip. I heard a few going by not far from the places where I was staying but with all the hills and thick vegetation, I did not see anything. I am spoiled by the wide open spaces around here. I did see a few trains moving when we drove through Sulfur, Louisiana today. KCS has a huge yard there right next to Interstate 10.
The battle station...er.. I mean bridge, is fully armed and operational. They are still working on it and collecting all the machinery scattered all over the place. Locomotive leading a long merchandise freight east bound. There is a guy up on a cherry picker on the left attaching a cable to a pile they just jerked from the mud to haul it over to the river bank. The site looking up stream from the Richmond Fire Station. A total of 12 large pipe pilings were driven in clusters of three through the braced frames I showed back a few posts. Two on each stack are capped with a concrete beam to which steel I beams are attached and more beams on top of those to hold the bridge spans. Here you can see up underneath where the spans are attached to the cross beams. I think those yellow columns were part of the structure used to jack the spans up while the cross beams were positioned. I am sure they will go away. I speculate that some day they will move the present spans over making room for new spans for a second track. They could then demolish the old spans and replace them with new without disrupting traffic for long periods of time. Of course they would have to replace the remaining two piers in the same manner before taking on that project. A train crossing the bridge as viewed from Second Street in Rosenberg. It appears they leased these tug boats and barges from a company in Cameron, Louisiana. They would normally be used in oil field work but with the present crash in the oil industry, they probably got a good deal on them.
They were plucking the monster cable wenches off the top of the piles and then attaching the vibrators to the top of the piles. They would get the pile shaking real good and just pull it out of the mud. A freshly pulled pile is chained up to the jack up leg on the barge here. Real slick.
Cameron LA. I got to spend a very long month there, many years ago, doing offshore atmospheric dispersion studies. A very different world, there.
I was in and out of Cameron a number of times while working in oil patch. Was my usual jump off point to go service electronics equipment on off shore oil rigs. Sometimes on a crew boat and other times via a helicopter. I almost drowned a couple of times taking the mandatory safety training. HUET, or helicopter underwater escape training was the worst.
Looks like the river has gone down further. Is it about back to whatever "normal" is now? I wonder if they'd be dumping any more rock on that bank....
Not yet. You can see the rubble from the demolition of the top of the pier piled up on top of the cofferdam patch from years ago. The cofferdam is still underwater.
