In my new hometown, bridges are all around me. Let me introduce you to an unexpected category that has made itself known to me: decommissioned and historical, bridges that reveal history but do not currently function as fully alive bridges.
Their giant bones are for looks-only or for seeing a different era. The modern ways of size and volume test physical limits, operating systems change. And the old ones and systems fade. Their full glory lives only in memory.
They are standing there being visible and being a ghost at the same time.
Say hello to my primary ghost bridge.
I met him on my walk down to my Swinging Bridge. His steel profile is shocking and curiously beautiful in morning light.
Named the Black Bridge, sometimes he was referred to as the Free Bridge (no tolls). He handled rail and cars. The last train crossed in 2022, carrying scrap metal to Topsham. Car traffic permanently closed in 2011.
Here is the ghost head-on. What you don’t see is the car bridge layer that was hanging underneath (removed in 2014).
We’ve got one part visible and one part invisible ghost.
What is my mind to do when it starts thinking about ghost bridges?
I think I see them everywhere!
In Bath Maine, I meet the sleek Sagadahoc and the Carlton Bridges. I thought I was looking at a ghost bridge next to its replacement until I saw my own photo documentation on a different day.
My understanding is that ghosts cannot move material matter.
The Carlton bridge in 2025 still services freight train passage a couple of times a week. The vertical lift (and lowering) system is a technical marvel. All vehicle traffic on top stopped in 2000 with the birth of our elegant Sagadahoc.
I decide that the Carlton is half-ghost, since it still performs bridging duties. His ghost-ness seems more visible since both he and the new boss have separate, more specialized job functions. The high-contrast of standing next the Sagadahoc calls attention to the duality of it all: old and new, then and now, seen and unseen. This spot is as good as any for pausing.
But allow me one more:
This is an about-to-be-ghost bridge. I wrote about our friend, the Frank J. Wood bridge previously.
His demise is immanent. We’re in the project timeline when only one-way, south-bound traffic is permitted. We want the job to finish yesterday. Sorry Frank. Backup traffic and our 5-mile detour to get home is getting old.
Good-bye and Godspeed to that place of memory. I don’t think you’d want me to get all sentimental. I expect your finale to be dramatic as your steel bones comes down.
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My ramble with active, pending, half-ghost bridges has me tossing around between my new home in Maine to my past home in Massachusetts, and then to my back-in-the-day, childhood homes further north in Maine again.
The bridges c’est moi.
Each layer is new and old, invisible and seen.
The next post will have to be about rivers since now they are also all around me. They are merrymeeting onto their last destination as rivers and to their first taste at being ocean.
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Ghost Bridge Postscript, because I can’t stop
More about the Black Bridge, my primary, see-almost-everyday, bridge. I get butterflies at the idea of driving a car on the wooden planks. The height, the big Androscoggin river below is enough for butterflies. But maybe needing to back up? Yikes! The rule was simple:
The one furthest across wins.
People in cars pick up speed.
There is a standoff. The loser backs up.
Someone eventually hit a structural part in 2011 and car crossing was shuttered forever.
A nice photo history here.
Here is an image of a flood in 1936 taking down this car portion of the bridge (replaced in the same year). They put a train on top to stabilize (and save) the whole bridge.
More about the Carlton and Sagadahoc Bridges
Carlton was born in 1927 and carried cars, wagons, and foot traffic on top and rail on the bottom. Now an occasional freight rail ends in Woolrich. In the rail’s full glory, it took passengers further up the coast to beautiful Rockport and Camden.
This statement: My understanding is that ghosts cannot move material matter.
As I wrote it and let it stand in this entry, I am bothered by this simplistic view about ghosts.
I thought of a lost loved one, an old job, a charged thought, then took note of my heart rate.
Ghosts absolutely do move material matter.
