Delaware River Viaduct


The Delaware River Viaduct is a reinforced concrete railroad bridge across the Delaware River about south of the Delaware Water Gap that was built in 1908-10 as part of the Lackawanna Cut-Off rail line. It is the sister to the line's larger Paulinskill Viaduct. The Delaware River Viaduct also crosses Interstate 80 on the east side of the river and Slateford Road and the Lackawanna Railroad's "Old Road" on the west side. Abandoned in 1983, it is part of a New Jersey Transit proposal to restore passenger service to Scranton, Pennsylvania.
The bridge is long and high from water level to the top of the rail, and is composed of five spans and two spans.

Design and construction

The bridge was originally envisioned as a curved bridge with a 1°30" curve that would have allowed speeds of 80 mph. But the design was altered to include a tangent stretch of track across the bridge, a 1°30" curve on the New Jersey side and a 3°30" curve on the Pennsylvania side of the bridge. This tighter curve required trains to slow to 50 mph. No other curves on the 28-mile Cut-Off were sharper than 2°.
Construction of the bridge was described in a 1909 article by Abraham Burton Cohen, then a draftsman for the Delaware, Lackawanna and Western Railroad, who went on to design the Tunkhannock Viaduct, an even larger structure on the railroad's Clarks Summit-Hallstead Cut-Off.
The footings were excavated down to bedrock, which ranges from to below the surface. A total of of concrete and 627 tons of reinforcing steel were used to construct this bridge.
At its completion, the viaduct was thought to be the largest reinforced concrete structure built with a continuous pour process.
There is no known evidence to support the legend that several workers fell into the concrete during construction and could not be extracted because of the need to keep pouring.
The bridge was completed on December 1, 1910, about a year before the Cut-Off opened, which allowed construction trains to haul building materials to work sites east of the bridge.

Disuse

The tracks were removed by Conrail in March 1989, five years after the rest of the New Jersey section of the Cut-Off.
A proposal to restore train service between Andover, New Jersey, and Scranton would require substantial repairs to the bridge. As of 2019, the Pennsylvania Northeast Railroad Authority is gathering funding to commission a study to update the 2009 estimates of the costs of restoring service, including the bridge repairs.