Deep in California’s Anzo-Borrego Desert, just 15 miles from the Mexican border, lies the Goat Canyon Trestle – the world’s largest freestanding trestle bridge. Dating back to the early 1930s (or 1933, to be precise), the nail-free bridge – made up of a series of short platforms supported by rigid frames called bents that resemble tripods – stands 57 metres tall, stretches 187 metres across a canyon and designed to curve gently to withstand the desert’s strong winds and fluctuating temperatures.
The bridge was constructed to solve the “impossible railway,” a frontier 1919 San Diego and Arizona Eastern Railway (SD&ER) connecting San Diego to the Imperial Valley via Mexico and a series of burrowed mountains and canyons. Instead, engineers spanned the Goat Canyon with a massive wooden trestle, with the records revealing that “it was built of lumber instead of steel because variations in temperature of up to 75°F (or 22°C) in a single day create problems with expansion and contraction that would result in metal fatigue had they used steel.”
“What makes this accomplishment even more extraordinary is that the bridge was constructed to survive the extremes of the desert. Redwood (the timber chosen in the bridge) can handle the desert’s constant shifting between hot and cold, unlike metal, which could expand and weaken in the scorching summers and bitter winters.”
In late 2024, The World of Extrodinary covered the bridge as part of it’s Extrodinary Engineering series.
In total, more than 157,000 linear feet of lumber were used in the bridge’s construction, with the SD&AR chief engineer Carl Eichenlaub designing the trestle with a curvature of more than 14 degrees to withstand heavy winds. In addition, each section was built from the bottom of the canyon and then elevated by a crane before being lowered into position – with reports revealing that many of the workers involved in the construction stayed on the job for just three days due to height and vertigo.
- To learn more about the bridge, read Fox 5 San Diego’s special feature on the Goat Canyon Trestle from yesterday.
