As you may have heard, your new 35W bridge is on course to open in mid-September, well before the Christmas Eve deadline specified in the design-build contract. (News story from Sunday’s Strib is here.) This means Roadguy will soon run out of time to post photos of the construction, so here are a few. (The first and last are of the “click to enlarge” variety.)

First, as promised from Friday’s visit, here’s a view of a traveling girder segment from above:

(Note there’s no circle on top, ergo no manhole possibility.)

I went down to the bridge again on Saturday. Here’s a decent view of the gizmo that puts the segments on the trailer for hauling:

Them’s some big tires.

I was not alone for the “Sidewalk Superintendent Tour”:

I counted a hundred people; apparently one week they had more than 200. Fortunately, the crowd is broken into smaller groups, and the tour guides have microphones, so it’s pretty easy to see and hear. The tours tend to block the bike-pedestrian area on the upstream side of the 10th Avenue Bridge, so:

But the project includes a reward for bicyclists: a bike/ped tunnel underneath the freeway on the south side of the bridge. Here’s what a tunnel looks like when it’s still above ground:

They were doing some waterproofing. The whole thing will soon be buried by truckloads of fill, with 10 lanes of traffic on top.

Here are two build-a-bridge links:

• The Strib’s webcam of the site is here.
• A MinnPost video tour, with some rather speedy zooming, is here.

Thoughts? Add ‘em below. (And apologies for the lack of post yesterday — I had Monday off.)

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 7th, 2008 at 6:05 am and is filed under Main, Scenes and stories. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.