Portal:Louisville/Selected article/12
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The Big Four Bridge is an abandoned six-span railroad truss bridge that crosses the Ohio River, connecting Louisville, Kentucky and Jeffersonville, Indiana. It was completed in 1895, and updated in 1929. It has its largest span at 547 feet (167 m), for 2,545 feet in total. It gets its name from the defunct Cleveland, Cincinnati, Chicago and St. Louis Railway, which was nicknamed the "Big Four Railroad". Current plans for the Big Four Bridge include making it a pedestrian walkway, making it only the second one in the Louisville area for pedestrians to cross the Ohio River (the George Rogers Clark Memorial Bridge is currently the only one crossing the Ohio River between Louisville and its Indiana suburbs of New Albany, Clarksville, and Jeffersonville). Access to the Big Four Bridge is currently limited, as the access ways onto the bridge for the general public were removed in 1969, earning the Big Four Bridge the nickname "Bridge That Goes Nowhere".
The Big Four Bridge had one of the biggest bridge disasters in the United States, occurring on December 15, 1893 when a construction crane was dislodged by a severe wind. This caused the falsework support of a truss to be damaged, and the truss – with forty-one workers on it – fell into the Ohio River. Twenty of the workers survived, but twenty-one died. The accident almost cost more lives, as a ferry crossing the Ohio River just barely missed being hit by the truss. Hours later, a span next to the damaged span also fell into the river, but was abandoned at the time, causing no injuries as a result.
