The Triad Bridge Doesn't Have Three Bridges. Hmmm...

1/3/2023

Yesterday Christine J sent a photo of leaves encased in ice that she took close to Douglas, Massachusetts on the Southern New England Trunk Trail.

Today my cousin-in-law David, who is an AVID train enthusiast, sent me information about that trail. He sent about twice as much as I’m posting here, I condensed and edited it to this info about the Triad Bridges. Often I don’t read his explanations about train stuff very deeply, though Len does. But today this history caught my attention.

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From Dave S:

The trail that runs through Douglas, MA has a point of interest further east, a bit west of Blackstone. The trail map (which is the photo at the head of this post) shows it as a point of interest. Then there’s a photo of the two bridges at that point (which is the image at the end of this post).

But the legend by the photo refers to that point of interest as the “Triad Bridge”.

So, where is the third bridge?
That third bridge was once under construction, the concrete abutments had even been poured. But it was never completed. Why?

It was being built by the Southern New England Railway, a subsidiary of the Central Vermont Railway, which was in turn owned by the Grand Trunk Railway (mainly a Canadian railway, that became a major component of the Canadian National). What kept the Southern New England Railway from being completed was that one of its major financial backers died when the Titanic went down. So that railway is now often referred to as the railway that went down with the Titanic.

Had it been built, there would have once been three RR bridges crossing over/under one another at that point.

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MB again. The sinking of the Titanic is where Downton Abbey starts, too. The luxury ship goes down, wealthy people die, the modern world begins.

You may have seen train maps of Europe compared to train maps of US. Europe is literally knitted together by hundreds of tracks. The US has just a few tracks. It’s difficult to use trains as a way to travel in the US conveniently.

Our railroad system was developed by rich men and when one of them died, we got less infrastructure.