No railroad allowed switches on bridges, did they?

[OldEastRR]

Two questions down, and 8 to go...
Do you like trying to guess from clues or not?  Not the Midwest, tho. The MILW line (or what was later bought by the MILW) was along with the GN of the first 2 railroads. This was logging country way back when. The MILW had a ferry dock here.
I like riddles but maybe you don't, so if you don't want to guess let me know. Town is still on a major line of the BNSF, so not all of our track is abandoned.

[Ed Kapuscinski]

No problem with that at all, and it will even eliminate the need for replacing the ties.  If those are feeders in the crossover track, use a removable crossing (wood or rubber, depending on your era) and they would be accessible without damaging the scenery.

I was just thinking that! Because, I KNOW, of all of the feeders on the layout, those, which have the least redundancy, and the are the most inaccessible, will be the ones that break.

[BOK]

If you are referring to the Amtrak derailment in Kansas it was caused by a feed truck backing into the rails and knocking them out of alignment.
It was not a rail defect on the part of BNSF nor was it in a crossing or on a bridge.

BTW, the Soo had a dual control switch on the west end of the Mississippi river bridge in Minneapolis since removed.

exprail

[nkalanaga]

If it had a ferry dock I will assume Washington state, but no, I'm not fond of riddles.  Somewhere around Tacoma?

[randgust]

The most completely messed-up 'violated every design rule' railroad I've ever seen, foot for foot, was the Petaluma & Santa Rosa in Petaluma, CA.

Start off with the First St. yard (much now gone) that was three parallel tracks in the street, with switches, and crossovers, and SELF GUARDED FROGS above the pavement so that it was a bone-crushing drive down the street.   Unreal.  Google Streetview still shows at least one.

Then go almost a quarter of a mile with the main line hung on the side of the bay, wood-pile trestle, as no right of way through the town was left.

Then, at the feed mill (which is still there and active), the main line went through the diverging side of the turnout, followed by a reverse-curve turnout right up to the crossing edge.  Horrible geometry.

Then, the next (curved) turnout in the opposite direction had the points in the middle of the street crossing.  That one, at least, is mercifully gone.

[Lenny53]

https://www.google.ca/maps/@45.4950661,-73.5212041,1559m/data=!3m1!1e3?hl=en

Not quite a traditional passing siding, but the Victoria bridge in Montreal has a double track main and a double track detour so that if ships are crossing one of the lift bridges, trains can still get through the other span.

There is a lock the lake boats go through, so while he lock is filling or emptying trains can pass on one end or the other end of the lock while the train bridge is lifted on the opposite end.

[OldEastRR]

If it had a ferry dock I will assume Washington state, but no, I'm not fond of riddles.  Somewhere around Tacoma?

The NP track is in Bellingham, Wa. GN (or the RR it bought) came up along the coast (only enough room there for one ROW), MILW bought the local logging railroad that worked the log camps, had a ferry to connect it to Seattle lines, ran into town and to Vancouver, B.C. NP came from the interior westbound to Bellingham, and the track in my picture was the line that ran from downtown (thru alleys) then down a long grade to get to the GN line near the water.
There was quite a lot of interesting RR stuff here, from ferries to trestles up hillsides to steep grades to parallel RRs street running to a logging mill on a lake to causeways taking track across bays and inlets to funky engine facilities (both MILW and NP had them in town), and, to  top it off an interurban/streetcar system linking Bellingham to other towns. The BNSF still uses the coast line as a major route into Canada, and to bring in oil trains to the local refineries.

[nkalanaga]

Bellingham, huh?  I'd forgotten that the NP went up there, and I've never been there.  Thank you!

My father may have worked for the NP, but I've always been more interested in the GN, strictly by accident.  I bought a ConCor Empire Builder coach after Christmas 1969, and it looked so nice, compared with the few other cars I had then, that I decided to model the GN.  A few months later the BN merged, and that worked very nicely.  Given the limited variety in N scale back then, I could model 5 railroads at once!  But there was still more GN than NP stuff available, so I'm modeling a fictional ex-GN line.