Featured Bridge - New River Bridge

On June 28, 1973, the West Virginia Department of Highways awarded a bridge contract that set new world records.  Recently commemorated on the West Virginia quarter design, the bridge is the state’s crown jewel.

The New River Bridge was constructed by the American Bridge Division of US Steel at a cost of nearly thirty seven million dollars and opened to traffic in 1977. At the time, the bridge was the most expensive single project ever undertaken by the Appalachian Development Highway program.

It carries the state’s Appalachian Corridor L highway or US 19 across the massive New River gorge deep in the hills of Fayette County. 

With a main span of seventeen hundred feet, the steel arch bridge was the world-record-holder for twenty-five years until 2003, when it was topped by another steel arch bridge in Shanghai, China.

The total length of the bridge and approaches is just over three thousand feet.  It is supported by nine land piers and two abutments. 

Contributing to the massiveness of the span are over twenty-one thousand tons of structural steel, seventeen hundred tons of reinforcing steel, seventeen thousand cubic yards of concrete for the substructure and six thousand cubic yards of superstructure concrete, making a total weight of more than eighty-eight million pounds. 

During construction, rail lines at the bottom of the gorge on either side of the river transported machinery and materials to the site.  A thirty-five hundred-foot cableway across the canyon erected the steel, the largest piece of which weighed one hundred seventy-two thousand pounds.

At eight hundred seventy six feet above the waters of the New River, the New River Bridge is the second-highest in the nation and the highest east of the Mississippi.

It would top the Washington Monument by three hundred twenty five feet, making it the perfect site for BASE jumpers on the only day such parachuting is legal—Bridge Day, the third Saturday in October.

West Virginia has some of the country’s most exciting and innovative bridges, which are setting the standard for bridge design worldwide. 

The Mountain State continues to lead the way in bridge aesthetics, innovations, and safety while looking forward with confidence to future crossings.