Portal:Transport/Selected article/Week 38, 2008

The Forksville Covered Bridge is a Burr arch truss covered bridge over Loyalsock Creek in the borough of Forksville, Sullivan County, in the U.S. state of Pennsylvania. It is 152 feet 11 inches (46.61 m) in length, was built in 1850, and was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1980. The bridge is named for the borough it is in, which is named for its location at the confluence or "forks" of the Little Loyalsock and Loyalsock Creeks. Pennsylvania had the first covered bridge in the United States, and the most such bridges in both the 19th and 21st centuries. They were a transition between stone and metal bridges, with the roof and sides protecting the wooden structure from weather. The Forksville bridge is a Burr arch truss type, with a load-bearing arch sandwiching multiple vertical king posts, for strength and rigidity. The building of the Forksville bridge was supervised by the 18-year-old Sadler Rogers, who used his hand-carved model of the structure. It served as the site of a stream gauge from 1908 to 1913 and is still an official Pennsylvania state highway bridge. The United States Department of Transportation Federal Highway Administration uses it as the model of a covered bridge "classic gable roof", and it serves as the logo of a Pennsylvania insurance company.The bridge was restored in 1970 and 2004 and is still in use, with average daily traffic of 217 vehicles in 2006. Despite the restorations, as of 2006 the bridge structure's sufficiency rating on the National Bridge Inventory was only 17.4 percent and its condition was deemed "basically intolerable requiring high priority of corrective action". It is one of three remaining covered bridges in Sullivan County, and according to Susan M. Zacher's The Covered Bridges of Pennsylvania: A Guide, its location "over the rocky Loyalsock Creek" is "one of the most attractive settings in the state."

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