The Oldest Railroad Covered Bridge in the World
Near Manchester, New Hampshire
Just off the road here in Contoocook village stands a covered bridge with a claim no other railroad bridge in the country can match. First built around eighteen fifty and rebuilt in eighteen eighty-nine, it carried trains across the Contoocook River for decades and is now considered the oldest surviving railroad covered bridge in the country.
Most covered bridges sheltered foot traffic or horse carts. A bridge built to handle the weight and vibration of a steam locomotive was a different engineering problem entirely. The Contoocook bridge used a doubled Town lattice truss, a design favored in New England for its rigidity under heavy load. The cover was not decorative, it protected the structural timber from rain rot that could make a bridge unsafe in just a few years without it.
The bridge stopped carrying trains in the twentieth century and now sits as a preserved landmark, listed on the National Register of Historic Places. It is a quiet monument to the railroad age that once made this valley hum.
