Kinda surprised this isn’t getting more national attention, but there was a hazmat truck accident on the Brent Spence bridge that connects Ohio and Kentucky at Cincinnati. The trucks caught on fire and damaged the bridge. Closure could last months. Why bring this up? That bridge carries 3% of the nations GDP.
My boss just went there for a project of ours. He is in the area today. The client sent an e-mail telling us about the closure. Didn’t realize it was such an important artery.
WOW- when i was trucking i crossed that bridge many many hundreds of times…THATS gonna be a goatscrew for a looong time.
Man Id hate to know I had to deal with that daily.
Another bridge is out of service because overweight trucks used it anyway. What a CF.
The John A. Roebling Suspension Bridge is now closed indefinitely “due to numerous and continued violations of the bridge’s weight limits," Covington Police announced late Wednesday.
The Brent Spence Bridge closed early Wednesday morning after a crash and fire occurred before 3 a.m. on the northbound deck. When that bridge closed awaiting inspection and repairs, some vehicles rerouted to the Roebling.
But the Roebling, a historic bridge opened in 1867, has an 11-ton weight limit that was put in place after a 2007 inspection.
Covington Police posted Wednesday evening stating they would “aggressively and strictly” enforce the weight limit; and a couple hours later announced the bridge was closed completely.
Put most of that freight on the rails where it belongs.
I lived in Cincy for awhile. Wife wanted to look for houses in Kentucky. I told her that I don’t do bridges. Zero options for bad days like this.
This will set back Cincy 20 years, to 1980…
If you are going to Cincy, fly out of Dayton 
20 years is 2000, but being an Ohio native, I take your point.
But not a fan of Mark Twain?
Bad day? Ohio governor said initial estimate is that it would be closed between 30 and 90 days.
Did some more research, this bridge connects Louisville to Columbus and i75 which goes from michigan to Florida. 190,000 vehicles a day. Nightmare for that area. Plus 10 miles of northbound traffic is closed forcing 50k people to use backroads to get home.
Did some quick digging. Seems like they’ve been proposing to build a new bridge next to this one for years. Well. Yeah, that’s usually how it ends up unfortunately.
We moved out of Cincinnati in 2012, and at that time they were supposedly just about to start working on a replacement which it was said would take in the area of 6-8 years to complete. Too bad they never got the project rolling, the new bridge might be open and the Brent Spence just a memory. I feel for people still in the area, I-75 there is a disaster on a typical work day, can even imagine now…
This. Our reliance on OTR trucks moving cargo across the country is stupid.
Andy
For the sake of argument: aren’t rails fewer and easier to disable than the entire highway network?
I chase tornadoes all over the country as a hobby. For every rail line, there’s probably 10 truck routes. To disable the entire highway network would be an unbelievable undertaking. Sure you can take out key choke points, but there’s always a way around it. Rail would be much easier to disable. Don’t forget, the primary reason for the interstate system was troop movements
I was speaking economy, not security.
Relying on rail would affect security and economy. OTR trucking could and probably should be reduced but is a sufficient alternative to rail in the event of attack on the rail system.
From my reading of history - particularly WWII - I seem to recall that rails are generally very easily and very rapidly repaired, particularly compared to modern roads expected to carry 18-wheelers.
Not when you have environmental studies to conduct 
Fewer rail miles now? Yes.
Easier to disable? No.
Derailments happen, probably far far more often than the public ever knows about. On average for a major derailment that takes out a single or multiple main tracks, a Class 1 RR will have the line opened up and running in 24 hours or less. That’s in an instance where the track itself is totally destroyed.
The derailments I have worked usually go something like this:
1.) Train details and puts cars on the ground, rips up the rail, smashes up the ties and generally messes stuff up. Could be a couple miles of track damaged if something was dragging before popping off the rail. At any rate the balloon goes up that there is a service interruption.
2.) Within the hour phones start ringing with Maintenance of Way, Mechanical, and Operations (train crews/dispatch etc) departments. Also a company called R.J. Corman gets a call, they have a lot of equipment to clean up derailments.
3.) About hour 2, the RR departments listed above start calling in crews, and getting materials headed to the site. Every division will have cars in a siding somewhere loaded with track panels (rails on concrete ties already attached), and other stuff for repairing a bunch of track. Also somewhere there’s going to be a bunch of dump cars full of ballast. Those are going to very shortly be having locomotives with a crew assigned to go snatch them out of the siding and head to the derailment site. Mechanical inspectors will head out to make a decision on what can be saved or moved.
R.J. Corman will fire up a fleet of low boy flatbeds with dozers and cranes and all manner of toys, and head that way.
4.) Depending on how far everyone has to go heavy equipment will be on site and getting after it within 4-5 hours, at least on my division.
All the broken shit gets bull dozed off to the side. Cars, locomotives (moved one way or another), the rail, ties, ballast, cargo, whatever… pushed out of the way into a pile.
Anything standing on solid rail that isn’t damaged will be moved via rail out of the area.
Then the track guys get to work laying new track, and dumping ballast on it, tamping it, and making sure the track is passable. If multiple mains are wiped out all effort goes into getting one main open. I don’t think I have ever seen this take more than 24 hours to be running again. Usually less than 12 for a single main to get opened up.
5.) Simultaneously to the first few hours the folks responsible for routing traffic start re-routing everything they can or stopping what they cannot so things stay moving or at least don’t pile up.
In Atlanta in 2017, a fire under I-85 set by a homeless bum caused part of the interstate to collapse. Traffic had to be rerouted, not just on the interstate but the local traffic that was blocked by the collapsed highway.
The spared no expense and rebuilt the collapsed road in less than two months.
But that’s on dry land, not across a river.
This is going to be ugly.