Bridge capacities

I was joking.

 

can you split up the load and make multiple trips?

 

Wow,are you the first heavy truck to deliver there? Does this customer get semis all the time? Or straight trucks? Are you the experiment,to see if it works?I would venture to say"yes youll make it,just dont get caught". I remember delivering to a Co Op in Howell,Nebraska.Only this was 80000 lb facing a 10 ton wooden bridge.No,Way,not trying it.Funny thing was I didnt need to cross it anyway! Bad Mapquest! Customer had a pickup making local drop,seen me and laughed his as. Off at my Mapquest the office printed off for me.

 

You can call dispatch and say "there needs to be a second truck at that bridge to shuttle the load onto in smaller increments because I am overweight for the bridge with this load".

You will be responsible for the bridge damage and/or citation if you cross that bridge, having a story like "I called someone and they said go for it" will relieve non of that responsibility.

The only other option I would give dispatch in that scenario is telling them I will cross it overweight with a police escort, then make sure you film it if they provide one.

Don't "ask", tell them what their options are; the driver bears all the responsibility so the driver is the only voice that counts.

 

Years ago we were driving pilings for a new bridge and had to cross over to the other side of the river to drive the other abutment pilings. To cross the bridge with our truck crane we had to knock out all the boom and put all the counterweights on trucks and move it like we were moving 100 miles even though it was only 100 yards. This was your typical concrete post-tensioned box girder earthquake resistant California bridge overpass you see all day long along I-5 and CA 99. But Caltrans would take no chances.

 

Look more no what we all say.....hes going over it.....

ALSO i can promise you that bridge holds WELL over 20tons.....talk to any engineer that builds #### and hes going to tell you what all of them will tell you....the bridges are can hold 3 or 4 times the weight of what is posted...

 

Like he has said now several times
He is a contractor going into a job site
Virgin site. There many or may not of been heavier lds on that bridge before.
No matter what some of you super truckers think or say, those bridges are posted for a reason. Take a look under some of the bridges and you wouldn't want to take a bicycle across them
When first buit, yes the extra weight factor is built in the engineering part
Now the bridges get older. Metal gets weaker due to no maintenance on them
Concrete starts to get weathered with no maintenance either.
So this will cause the bridge to weaken
So that 40 ton bridge built 20 years ago that has not been properly maintenanced is now only good for let's say 30 tons.. but last week it wasn't posted. True, but now they noticed it is starting to fail. Hence the reason for the reduction in allowed wght
Case in point. Remember a few years back, the I 65 bridge from In into Ky was failed in rating. You had to go around on 265 to 64 then back to 65. This was due to structure issues.. So just don't assume it will hold you.

 

i used to drive over a 20T bridge every day at 80k bridge was only 10-15ft long at most. road was marked i think 7-8 tons per axle 80k max with no places to turn off the road from the closest per axle weight limit sign to the bridge. i figured i never put more than 20 tons on the bridge at any givin time, one day i had stopped at a fuel station just a couple miles from the bridge and there was a dot bear there getting fuel. i walked up to him and asked him about that particular bridge and if the weight rating was for the amount of weight on the bridge or total gross combined weight of the vehicle. his response was essentially that he had inquired about that exact same question to the county and could not get a straight answer from them, that they had told them that the weight limit of the bridge is based off the number of pillars on the bridge seems how the bridge was so short only one pillar at each end 10t per pillar so 20t weight limit. so he said he personally would only enforce the amount of weight actually on the bridge at any time from that information.

 

I've exceeded over double bridge weight ratings before and have been involved in bridge engineering before.

That sign doesn't really mean a whole lot, other than you will be responsible if you violate it. Lots of times, especially on rural roads, they will slap a weight rating on a bridge just so they don't have to pay for an inspection to get the real rating. Other times they put a weight rating on just because the neighbors complained and didn't want trucks going down their road.

Whatever the rating is on a two lane bridge, the real rating should be at least double that, to cover two trucks at the limit passing on the bridge.

Standard mode of operation when taking a heavy load across a bridge is to make sure nobody else is on the bridge, go slow, and stay in the middle of the bridge.

I'd have to look at the bridge in question before I'd cross it. If everything looked ok, I'd be tempted to proceed.

Years ago I delivered a dozer to a guy in a rural area. The guy says " do not cross the bridge right before you get there, wait there and I'll meet you. I got there and stopped at the bridge like he told me. He said "come here and I'll show you why". We walked under the bridge and he showed me that the bridge beams were a old school bus frame. The bridge on top looked decent enough and wasn't very long but I'm sure that school bus frame was almost at capacity just holding the deck up. There were no signs warning of capacity. We unloaded the dozer there and he just drove it on the shoulder to his house. There was a small gravel road that went down beside the bridge and across the creek that you traveled when you had more than a small car or pickup but there was no way I'd get the lowboy through that.

 

M16ty hit the nail on the head with his post. There are many factors good and bad for the bridge being posted.
Thank you M16ty