Steel truss bridge on State Road 42
Kodak EasyShare Z730 Zoom
2008
This week: ten posts where I look back at lovely scenes from long-ago road trips.
We begin with my 2008 trip along Indiana’s State Road 42, which extends from just southwest of Indianapolis at Mooresville west to the edge of Terre Haute. It’s a narrow highway with several hard turns, making it kind of annoying to drive end to end. But nobody does that, as I-70 and US 40 parallel it nearby and they’re both straight four-lane highways. SR 42 primarily provides local access among the small towns that lie along it.
Two steel truss bridges remain on this highway, one over Eel Creek in Clay County and this one, built in 1940 over Mill Creek in Putnam County. Both, I hear, have been rehabilitated and are now painted light blue. I love to hear that any old truss bridge still serving on a highway has been rehabilitated. I also rather like the patina the bridge had earned in this photo. Still, now I want to make another SR 42 trip to see them.
That’s my little red Toyota Matrix parked at the roadside, the one I wrecked on a road trip the next year. My various road-trip cars (this Matrix, the blue Matrix that replaced it after it was totaled, and my Ford Focus) appear in my road-trip photos all the time.
