‘We got a bridge in 3 hours.’ Unusual material allows NCDOT to build fast after Helene
The remnants of Hurricane Helene turned Ivy Creek north of Asheville into a torrent that carried away the Hobson Branch Road bridge, along with all the trees and two houses nearby.
The new bridge that took its place a little more than four months later looks much the same, except with shiny new guardrails and fresh black asphalt. As you drive over, there’s nothing to suggest that the bridge is actually made of two old railroad flatcars.
As it worked to replace bridges destroyed by Helene, the N.C. Department of Transportation has relied on these unusual building materials and a Tennessee company that has them in abundance.
Innovative Bridge Company, based in Nashville, has installed 40 bridges made with railroad cars for NCDOT since Helene. Each car is 90 feet long and 9 feet wide. Once the supports are in place at either end, a single-span flatcar bridge like the one at Hobson Branch Road takes no time to install, said Aaron Earwood, NCDOT’s state bridge construction engineer.
“They put two of them together, weld right down the middle, weld a guardrail to it,” Earwood said. “And we got a bridge in three hours.”
Flooding from Helene damaged more than 800 NCDOT bridges in Western North Carolina. Nearly 150 were beyond repair and will need to be replaced, at an estimated cost of more than $200 million.
NCDOT has used flatcars where bridges were washed away completely. It considers them temporary, but they’re sturdy enough to handle any traffic for the months or years it will take to build a permanent replacement.
Not only are they quick to put in, but the railcar bridges are relatively inexpensive. A single-span bridge costs $119,000 to $279,000, depending on the grading, substructure and other prep work, said NCDOT spokesman David Uchiyama. That’s roughly half the cost of traditional temporary bridges, Uchiyama said.
The first post-Helene flatcar bridge was installed in Asheville. The Swannanoa River wiped out the Hardesty Lane bridge, cutting off access to a storm debris processing yard, and city officials quickly began calling around about a fast, temporary replacement.
“They got quotes from all over, and they were like crazy high, and they were a month out,” said Lee Roberts, owner of Innovative Bridge Company. “I told them I’d be there in two days, and they said, ‘There’s no way.’ And I said I’ll be there in two days and have you a bridge installed.”
It actually took five days from that initial conversation, but the bridge was in place on Oct. 15. Someone from NCDOT was there to watch, and soon the department was placing an order.
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Company helps build about 200 bridges a year
Innovative Bridge didn’t invent the railroad flatcar bridge; the company’s website includes studies from Canada and the Midwest demonstrating the concept in the 1990s. The company got started a decade ago installing them for farmers in Mississippi, Roberts said.
A viral Facebook post brought in more business, from cities and clubs looking for pedestrian bridges in parks and golf courses; utilities that needed access to their equipment, and from street and highway departments. Roberts says Innovative Bridge now does about 200 bridges a year and has developed relationships with railroads looking to offload flatcars that have reached the end of their lives.
Innovative Bridge has a contractor that removes the wheels, brakes, trucks, couplers and air tanks from each car, which are shipped by truck to where they’re needed. About all that’s left to indicate that the steel structures were once freight railcars are the paint and markings on the side.
Roberts said the company’s bridges have always been a single railcar long. That changed when NCDOT began building piers and stringing them end to end. Two temporary bridges connecting Yancey and Mitchell counties are three railcars long, stretching 270 feet across the North Toe River.
“We’ve gone into territories we’ve never been into before,” Roberts said. “The DOT did the engineering, and we made it happen.”
In addition to Asheville and NCDOT, Roberts says his company also installed bridges to provide access to Christmas tree farms in Avery County before their busy season and did four for the N.C. Division of Emergency Management and two for the Tennessee Department of Transportation. Next up are contracts to begin replacing some of the hundreds of private bridges washed out by the storm.
In some cases, Innovative Bridge leases its railcars for bridges and takes them back when a temporary bridge is dismantled.
But NCDOT will need some of these temporary bridges for years and went ahead and bought the railcars. When the bridges are taken down, Earwood said, the flatcars will be stored at NCDOT maintenance yards across the state for whenever the department needs to quickly build temporary bridges.
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This story was originally published February 25, 2025 at 9:59 AM with the headline "‘We got a bridge in 3 hours.’ Unusual material allows NCDOT to build fast after Helene."
