Earlier this June, on the way to the Santa Fe Railway Historical and Modeling Society convention in Kansas City, I took a few grab shots of a couple of bridges on the BNSF Transcon.
At Tangier, Oklahoma, west of Woodward, there is a county road overpass built from a turntable span, salvaged from one of the small locomotive servicing areas nearby, and I can't remember exactly which station it came from. The extra photos show the setting in which the bridge exists.
At Melvern, Kansas, Santa Fe built an overpass for the road, using a standard through truss bridge that could have carried a single track. This is not the only location where ATSF did such a thing, Although it was overkill for wagons and horseless carriages, it was easier to erect a standard bridge than to design and order a custom bridge The number of these bridges has been reduced with modernization of roads over time, but a few still exist, this one being the best known. It no longer carries vehicles, but it has pedestrian and bicycle access, and is a decent platform for photos (though the vegetation is close to the track and better photos can be had from the highway bridge or a nearby road crossing).
Melvern also has a railroad park which contains a bay window Santa Fe waycar. Well, it's a Santa Fe painted waycar. The local folks wanted a caboose for the park but were late getting into the long line of requests. So they settled for a privately-owned Union Pacific bay window caboose, which the owner donated and the town painted in Santa Fe colors.
