Story of the Sheeps Canyon Trestle

Sheeps Canyon is located between Minnekahta Junction and Edgemont, South Dakota on the Chicago, Burlington, and Quincy Deadwood Branch, better known as the highline.  On this spot in the southern hills, a subsidiary of the CBQ, the Burlington and Missouri River Railroad, needed to cross the canyon with a bridge.  Like most railroads of the time, the standard way of crossing a large ravine was by timber trestle.

Sheep Canyon Trestle prior to filling in 1899.  Photo credit: The Railway Age Vol. 28, Issue 15, 1899.

Sheep Canyon Trestle days after filling has been completed.  Photo credit: The Railway Age Vol. 28, Issue 15, 1899.

Trestles are a type of bridge that uses steel or wood metal bents, vertical columns, shaped in an “A” style frame.  Between every two columns are spans of horizontal or diagonal braces.  A trestle can be made from any number of these “A” shaped columns.  Most trestles are small, crossing little gulley’s or very small creeks.  The Sheeps Canyon Trestle was different, however.  When completed the trestle was 700 feet across and 126 feet tall at its tallest point, by far the largest bridge on the Deadwood branch in the Black Hills of South Dakota. Originally built in 1890 by the Chicago Burlington and Quincy, the trestle had a short life of about 9 years until it was filled in with rock and gravel over the summer of 1899 from April 24^th to September 8^th.

The article in The Railway Age journal stated that it took 240,000 linear feet of lumber to complete the bridge and to fill it, 320,000 cubic yards of debris was used.  In the twenty weeks of filling, 1,486 trains came brought rock in 15 car trains.  It took an average of 45 men to complete the work.  When complete, the fill was 380 feet across at the bottom of the gulch and 28 feet high at track level.  So much earth was required that the railroad even dug into a nearby hill to assist in filling in the bridge.  Filling was contracted out to Kilpatrick Brothers and Collins of Beatrice Nebraska and supervision of the project was done by Woods Bros. of Minneapolis.

Today the fill is still present as part of the George S. Mickelson Trail about 8 miles outside Edgemont.

Photos and information pulled from a short article in The Railway Age journal from October 13^th, 1899.  It is a valuable source of info because it is a detailed account printed only a few weeks after the trestle was filled in.

Sources:

 “A Large Fill on the Burlington.” The Railway Age, vol. 28, no. 15, 13 Oct. 1899, pp. 754–755., books.google.com/books?id=4yhLAQAAMAAJ&dq=iowa%20rail%20bridge&pg=PA754#v=onepage&q&f=true. Accessed 24 Aug. 2017.