NORTHWESTERN RAILROAD TRACKS OVER TURTLE CREEK

NORTHWESTERN RAILROAD TRACKS OVER TURTLE CREEK

Rock

Turtle

1

13

E

2

NE

NW

1869

1977

bridge

NA (unknown or not a building)

Masonry Arch

Stone - Unspecified

Van Mienen

No

A 'site file' exists for this property. It contains additional information such as correspondence, newspaper clippings, or historical information. It is a public record and may be viewed in person at the Wisconsin Historical Society, State Historic Preservation Office. BUILDER WAS JOHN WATSON. HAER WI-24. This railroad viaduct over Turtle Creek is one of Wisconsin’s few surviving stone bridges. Known locally as the Tiffany Bridge, after a hamlet just to the north, it is a magnificent structure, 387 1/2 feet long, built of quarry-faced limestone blocks. Each of its five arches spans 50 feet and has a radius of 26 1/2 feet. John Watson, a contractor in Janesville who specialized in bridges and tunnels, built the span according to plans developed by the railway company’s chief engineer, a man known now only as van Mienen. The rugged stone used in the spandrels of the arches was quarried near Waupun and Green Bay and sent rough to the site, where workers cut it by hand. A corbeled cornice--four stepped courses of limestone blocks, topped by a stone cap--surmounts the arches. The piles below the limestone piers are battered on the downstream side to resist the force of the water’s flow. Upstream, they are deeply offset to resist the lateral pressure of the creek. The arches were reinforced with steel rods and concrete in the 1930s, enabling the bridge to bear the weight of modern locomotives that weigh nearly six times more than steam engines did in 1869. stone arch bridge

HISTORICAL SITES AND POINTS OF INTEREST IN ROCK COUNTY, WISCONSIN BY THE ROCK COUNTY TOURISM COUNCIL, 5/1994. Janesville Gazette 5/23/1997. Janesville Gazette 7/10/1997. Buildings of Wisconsin manuscript.

Tiffany Stone Bridge