Craig Symington, MMR/photos by the author
For the longest time the Highway 145 bridge over Leopard Creek at Old Placerville, Colorado, has been a mystery to me. For decades, while I’ve been searching for pictures, the highway crossing on my HOn3 Rio Grande Southern layout has been missing its bridge. The photographers of the day used the bridge as a vantage point to obtain spectacular photographs of trains rounding the bend to and from Placerville, but these same photographers never thought to take a photograph of the bridge they were standing on.
ABOVE: Here is the spot on my model railway where Highway 145 crosses Leopard Creek. It has been missing a highway bridge for decades. The bridge I build in this article will help the citizens of Placerville travel easier.
I’ve spent years speculating on what kind of bridge crossed Leopard Creek. Researching Colorado highway bridges on the internet showed that concrete was introduced in the 1920s but it wasn’t until the 1940s that it and iron became the preferred materials for small road bridges. I really wanted to build a concrete bridge with iron railings, but that wasn’t to be. The 1940s highways in rural Colorado were still mainly gravel. I’ve represented this on my layout and a modern looking bridge would look out of place with the gravel roads. It just didn’t seem plausible that such an expensive bridge would be built there. I was back to square one…
