Demolition underway on a piece of Dallas history near the Trinity River levees – The Dallas Morning News

Dallas is losing a significant piece of its history.

The Oak Cliff Advocate reports that the city began demolishing the landmark Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe railroad trestle bridge on Jan. 4. The process is expected to take about two weeks.

Its fate has been sealed since 2018 when the U.S. Congress approved spending about $275 million for long-needed floodway improvements near the Trinity River.

The bridge, which was built on the site of several previous iterations in 1934, has been out of commission since the 1980s, but it stood as a relic of Dallas past.

I think its a big loss to Dallas history, architect Marcel Quimby told The Dallas Morning News last year. The structure is part of the collective history of the Trinity River and Dallas reclamation of the Trinity and the levees built to control flooding. And I hate to lose that. The roots of that trestle are just so much a critical part of Dallas growth.

The train trestles demise has been a long time coming, with federal government and city officials warning it could cause significant damage if it collapsed during a flood. And when the river does flood, debris including garbage, tree limbs and even construction equipment gets caught in the bridges support beams.

The railroad originally built a trestle in 1872, and a steel truss from 1903 remains standing. A remnant of the trestle that runs under the Santa Fe Trestle Trail bike bridge is being preserved for now.

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Demolition underway on a piece of Dallas history near the Trinity River levees - The Dallas Morning News