This refers to the old railroad bridge the spanned old Illinois 157 in Edwardsville, which is an alignment of Route 66. The Belleville News-Democrat reports that the dismantling process of the bridge already has begun. I don’t know whether the road crews are finished, but it sure sounds like it:
On Tuesday, crews were hauling away the remains of the abandoned railroad corridor. Plans call for the area under the bridge to eventually be filled in with dirt, and a Madison County Transit trail will run over the former railroad crossing.
The planned dismantling of the bridge was learned only last week. There just wasn’t enough time to put a preservation effort together.
UPDATE: Roger of the Roger Kramer Cycling blog points out that “at least the railroad right-of-way is being used for a worthy purpose — connecting MCT’s [Madison County Transit] Watershed and Schoolhouse trails.”
The MCT trails Web site is here. A couple MCT trails shadow Route 66, and I support the Route 66 bike trail system that’s being set up in Illinois. Whether it’s by car or bicycle, the more travelers on Route 66, the better.
It is unfortunate that often the organizations planning destruction don’t let preservation groups know in advance of their intentions. Anybody think that this just might be on purpose?
What they don’t know, won’t hurt them. Right!!
I sure wish I’d known about the Ballard.
RoadDog, I’m not convinced that Madison County Transit did this intentionally. I suspect they just didn’t think about it at all. Given MCT’s strong track record on building bicycle trails and providing mass transit to the people of Madison County, I’m willing to give MCT the benefit of the doubt.
If anything, I think the metro-east newspapers dropped the ball on this one. Madison County Transit meetings are public meetings, but none of the local daily papers reported on the bridge until it was too late to do anything about it. You’d think the papers would do a more vigilant job of covering an agency that spends millions of taxpayer dollars.