We’ve known this day would come since 2018 when Congress approved spending $275 million in floodway improvements, including removal of this 87-year-old Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe rail bridge.

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Demolition on the bridge began Monday and is expected to take about two weeks.

The bridge, built on the site of several previous iterations in 1934, has been out of commission since the 1980s. A cement portion built in the 1960s was recently removed.

The trestle is a reminder of how Dallas was built into a metropolis. But it’s being torn down for environmental reasons. It’s a potentially dangerous unmaintained structure that also collects debris when the river floods, including portable toilets and construction equipment that sometimes get swept up. If the trestle collapsed in a flood, it would send literally tons of timber downstream, which could cause catastrophic property damage.

“I think it’s a big loss to Dallas’ history,” architect Marcel Quimby told the Dallas Morning News last year. “The structure is part of the collective history of the Trinity River and Dallas’ reclamation of the Trinity and the levees built to control flooding. And I hate to lose that. The roots of that trestle are just so much a critical part of Dallas’ growth.”

Quimby, who lives in Oak Cliff, wrote a comprehensive history on the bridge in 2005.

A railroad originally built a trestle there in 1879.

Even though it’s a dramatic historical loss, a remnant of the trestle that runs under the Santa Fe Trestle Trail bike bridge is being preserved for now.

U.S. Army Corps of Engineers photo courtesy of the Dallas Municipal Archives

Three bridges: DART’s light rail trestle, the City of Dallas’ Santa Fe Trestle Trail bike bridge and the 1934 Santa Fe trestle. This remnant is not being torn down.