Pine Ridge Lokie Bridge

im posting this in on a few forums because I think its pretty awesome this has survived so long. check this out.....

and now for the pine ridge colliery fans out there we made a pretty cool discovery today. well for a few months now while driving to the mine I would gaze around cause you never know what youre gonna see. while passing the site of the pine ridge mountain mine road that parallels mill creek I noticed they clear cut all of the trees down between southbound 81 and 315. looking over there you can look straight through the bridge where 315 passes over mill creek. well in the middle of the bridge, or under the bridge I should say, there was this steel framework that looked strikingly similar to a rr bridge, but smaller. so today on the way back from the mine we had to stop and check it out. well our suspicions were correct, it is the lokie bridge for the mountain mines roadbed. its pretty cool, mill creek passes under the bridge and 315 goes over the bridge. one neat thing is its still painted grey, it hasnt weathered since its under 315 and they must have painted it after the tracks were on it cause you could clearly see where the ties were because there is no paint there! also, you can see the old 315 bridge made out of old concrete. then when it was widened you can tell where it is a different style construction and newer concrete. funny thing is, no wonder all of our bridges are failing inspections and being replaced, the old concrete thats probably 75-100 years old is in perfectly fine shape. the newer concrete is chipping, cracking and falling apart. seems they don't mix concrete like they used to! banks got a bunch of cool pics if this so I hope he posts them soon.

Pics: http://www.ironminers.com/mineforum/viewtopic.php?t=19714

Pine Ridge Mountain Mines: http://www.undergroundminers.com/mountainmines.html

Pine Ridge Mountain Mine No. 34 Tunnel: http://www.undergroundminers.com/pr34tunnel.html

Pine Ridge Colliery Site: http://www.undergroundminers.com/pineridge.html

Here's a high resolution image I have of the original breaker, not sure of the date but probably around 1920. If you zoom in on the middle part you can see horse and wagons. There's probably a lot of cool details. I have access to an extensive collection of these images all 8X10's. I'm going to rescan them once I get a scanner with a "digital ice" to maximize the results. I'll be adding them to KB.