Repurposed Appalachia Series – Tracks Across the Sky: The Kinzua Bridge, the 2003 Tornado, and Pennsylvania’s Great Viaduct Ruin
If you follow U.S. Route 6 across the northern tier of Pennsylvania, the road climbs into a high plateau of hardwood ridges, gas wells, and old company towns that locals call the PA Wilds. Near the little borough of Mount Jewett, a side road turns off toward a narrow valley where steel once walked across the sky.
For more than a century the Kinzua Bridge, also known as the Kinzua Viaduct, carried trains three hundred feet above Kinzua Creek in McKean County. When it opened in 1882 it was advertised as the highest railroad bridge in the world and quickly became a symbol of industrial ambition in the northern Appalachian plateau.
Today visitors find something different. Eleven of the twenty towers lie twisted on the valley floor, thrown down in less than half a minute by a July 2003 tornado. The surviving western approach now ends in a glass floored skywalk where tourists lean out over the void and look back at the ruins. It is an Appalachian place where engineering history, extractive industry, and the destructive power of weather are all on display at once.
This is the story of how a remote creek hollow in the northern Appalachians became the site of a globally famous viaduct, how that structure helped move coal, oil, and lumber out of the plateau, and how its collapse and reinvention turned it into one of the region’s most unusual historic landscapes.
Coal, Oil, and a Problem of Distance
In the late nineteenth century the upper Allegheny River country was a boom landscape. The discovery of oil around Titusville, the growth of Bradford as a refining center, and heavy timber and coal development in McKean and Elk counties pulled investors and railroads into what had been a sparsely settled part of the northern Appalachians.
Thomas L. Kane, a Civil War veteran and entrepreneur, served as president of the New York, Lake Erie and Western’s coal and railroad interests in the region. He needed a faster way to move coal, oil, and lumber between the Bradford oil field and points south. The easiest route on a map required crossing the deep gorge of Kinzua Creek. The alternative was to run roughly eight additional miles of track over steep, twisting grades that would slow trains and add cost.
Rather than accept those grades, Kane and his engineers chose something far more dramatic. They would build a viaduct that carried the railroad hundreds of feet in the air, spanning the whole valley at once.
Building a Bridge in the Sky
Work on the Kinzua Viaduct began in 1881 with the placement of stone piers that would support the towers and deck. The Phoenix Bridge Company, a prominent bridge builder of the era, won the contract.
According to later engineering documentation and period accounts, a crew of roughly forty men erected the original iron structure during the summer of 1882, completing the 2,053 foot long bridge in only about ninety four working days.Scientific American devoted a feature to the project that year, describing the viaduct’s unusual construction technique. Instead of building expensive scaffolding from the ground up, workers raised the first tower with hoisting gear, then used a traveling crane mounted on the completed portion of the deck to erect each succeeding tower.
The finished viaduct stood roughly 301 feet above the floor of the gorge. Contemporary boosters called it the highest and longest railroad bridge of its kind anywhere, and later histories have repeated that claim, noting that it briefly held a world record. Passengers who crossed in open cars reported a sensation somewhere between train travel and ballooning, with nothing but trestle work and air between them and the forests far below.
The first Kinzua Bridge was made of wrought iron and designed for the locomotives of its own era. Within two decades, however, railroad technology had outgrown it.
Rebuilding for the Steel Century
By the 1890s the original bridge was no longer adequate for heavier rolling stock. Locomotives had grown nearly eighty five percent heavier, and the railroad recognized that pushing the old iron structure past its design limits would invite disaster.
In 1900 traffic was halted and the Kinzua Viaduct was taken apart and rebuilt in place using steel. The Elmira Bridge Company carried out the work from both ends of the span, again relying on traveling timber and steel “travelers” that advanced across the gorge as each old tower came down and each new one took its place. Roughly one hundred to one hundred fifty laborers worked ten hour days for almost four months, installing more than three thousand tons of steel at a reported cost of about 275,000 dollars.
The basic outline of the bridge remained the same, and from the valley floor the re engineered viaduct looked much like its predecessor, but it could now handle the heavier coal trains of the twentieth century. For the communities and camps scattered across the northern plateau, the bridge was both a spectacle and a piece of everyday infrastructure that linked the oil and coal country to markets beyond the mountains.
Freight trains continued to cross the viaduct until 1959, when commercial rail traffic on that route ended. The steel giant that had once carried coal and passengers above the treetops now sat quiet in a valley that was beginning to turn toward tourism and recreation.
From Salvage Contract to State Park
After the end of freight service, the railroad sold the bridge and surrounding land to Kovalchick Salvage Company. The obvious expectation was that the company would dismantle the structure and sell it for scrap. Local memory preserves a different story. When company head Nick Kovalchick first visited the bridge he is said to have refused to tear it down, remarking that there would never be another bridge like it.
Kovalchick instead worked with local advocates who hoped to preserve the viaduct as a historic and scenic resource. Their efforts reached Harrisburg. In 1963 Governor William Scranton signed legislation authorizing the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania to purchase Kinzua Bridge and nearby acreage for a new state park. The deed for roughly 316 acres was recorded in 1965, and Kinzua Bridge State Park opened to the public in 1970.
Visitors could walk or drive into the park, step out onto the deck of the bridge, and look down into the valley. The state park system built an access road, picnic areas, and basic facilities. In 1977 the American Society of Civil Engineers recognized the bridge as a National Historic Civil Engineering Landmark, and it was placed on the National Register of Historic Places that same year.
In the late twentieth century, excursion trains added another layer to the site’s meaning. The Knox and Kane Railroad operated tourist trips through the Allegheny National Forest and across the viaduct, advertising the ride as a way to experience both railroad history and the high forest scenery in one trip.
By the turn of the twenty first century, Kinzua Bridge State Park drew well over two hundred thousand visitors a year. Then engineers and inspectors began to worry about the one thing the nineteenth century builders had never fully planned for: high wind.
“In Less Than Thirty Seconds”
By 2002 the steel towers and anchor bolts of the viaduct showed serious corrosion. Conservation engineers warned that the structure’s center of gravity could shift dangerously during strong winds. That year the state closed the bridge to trains and pedestrians and began a restoration project.
On the afternoon of July 21, 2003, a long lived storm system rolled across northern Pennsylvania. Around 3:15 p.m., an F1 tornado with estimated winds of around 100 miles per hour touched down just west of Kinzua Bridge State Park and moved east northeast across the gorge.
National Weather Service investigators and later engineering reports concluded that the tornado struck the bridge from the side, pushing laterally against the slender towers and the corroded anchor bolts that held them to their concrete foundations. Eleven of the twenty towers were torn from their bases and hurled into the valley. The towers did not simply crumple in place. Some were picked up intact, shifted, then twisted in opposite directions as the rotating winds moved through, leaving a line of collapsed steel that still hints at the storm’s spiral path.
The violent part of the storm lasted only seconds at the site, but in that brief span a bridge that had stood over the valley for 121 years was broken. No visitors were on the deck when the towers fell, and only one park employee was injured during the collapse.
Photographs taken soon afterward show the remaining western span ending abruptly in space, with the rest of the viaduct scattered below like fallen pick up sticks among thousands of downed trees.
Skywalk and Ruins
In the months after the storm, state officials and engineers debated what to do with the site. Rebuilding the full bridge would have been extremely expensive. Estimates ran into the tens of millions of dollars, and the corrosion problems that had plagued the structure were not going away.
Instead Pennsylvania chose a different path. The fallen towers would remain in the valley as evidence of both the original engineering and the force that destroyed it. The surviving western section would be stabilized and reimagined as a pedestrian overlook. In 2011 the state opened the Kinzua Skywalk, a six hundred foot long decking on the remaining towers that ends in an observation platform with a glass floor panel over the gorge.
From the skywalk, visitors look down on the rusting towers where they fell and out across the Kinzua Creek valley. Trails descend from the rim to the valley floor, where hikers can walk among the twisted steel and look back up at the truncated bridge. In recent years a modern visitor center with exhibits on the viaduct’s history, regional ecology, and the 2003 storm has turned the park into both a scenic stop and an interpretive site.
The result is a layered landscape. The viaduct is still an artifact of industrial railroading, still a testimony to Gilded Age engineering, but the ruin itself has become part of the story. The site now illustrates how weather and time act on human structures in the Appalachian uplands, and how communities decide what to do with those ruins.
Kinzua Bridge in the Story of Appalachia
Although Kinzua Bridge is far from the coal camps of Harlan County or the textile towns of the southern Blue Ridge, it belongs within the larger Appalachian story. It was built to move extractive wealth out of the mountains, in this case the coal, oil, and timber of the northern Allegheny plateau. It depended on seasonal crews, immigrant labor, and the ambitions of railroad capital. It became a tourist attraction and source of local pride once its industrial purpose faded. Then it was dramatically reshaped by a natural force that drew new visitors precisely because of the damage it caused.
For the nearby towns of Kane and Mount Jewett, the bridge and state park have become anchors for tourism within the Allegheny National Forest region, drawing travelers who then move on to other trails, historic sites, and small communities along Route 6.
For the broader Appalachian region, Kinzua Bridge offers a reminder that not all mountain engineering history is underground. In a part of Pennsylvania best known for oil wells and second growth forests, a towering viaduct once carried trains above the trees. Now the same structure, half standing and half fallen, carries people into a conversation about how industry, weather, and memory shape mountain places across the entire chain.
However you approach it, from above on the skywalk or from below among the toppled steel, the Kinzua gorge is no longer just a problem of distance for a nineteenth century railroad. It is a northern Appalachian classroom under open sky, where you can stand at the edge of the glass, look down into the rust and rock, and feel how quickly a landscape can change.
Sources & Further Reading
American Society of Civil Engineers. “Kinzua Viaduct.” Historic Civil Engineering Landmarks. Accessed January 14, 2026. https://www.asce.org/about-civil-engineering/history-and-heritage/historic-landmarks/kinzua-viaduct
Bailey, Robert L. The Kinzua Viaduct. Mechanicsburg, PA: Stackpole Books, 2002. https://archive.org/details/kinzuaviaduct0000bail
Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, Department of Conservation and Natural Resources. “Kinzua Bridge State Park.” Accessed January 14, 2026. https://www.dcnr.pa.gov/StateParks/FindAPark/KinzuaBridgeStatePark/Pages/default.aspx
Elmira Bridge Company. Reconstruction of the Kinzua Viaduct, Pennsylvania Railroad, 1900. Engineering report excerpts reproduced in multiple archives. Accessed January 14, 2026. https://archive.org/details/reconstructionof00elmi
Historic American Engineering Record (HAER). “Kinzua Viaduct (Kinzua Bridge), McKean County, Pennsylvania.” Library of Congress. Accessed January 14, 2026. https://www.loc.gov/item/pa2197/
Kinzua Bridge Foundation. “History of the Kinzua Viaduct.” Accessed January 14, 2026. https://www.kinzuabridge.org/history
National Park Service. “Kinzua Bridge State Park Historic District.” National Register of Historic Places Registration Form. 1977. Accessed January 14, 2026. https://npgallery.nps.gov/GetAsset/NRHP/77001146_text
National Weather Service State College, PA Office. “Service Assessment: Tornado Event of July 21, 2003, McKean County, Pennsylvania.” Accessed January 14, 2026. https://www.weather.gov/media/ctp/ServiceAssessment07212003.pdf
Pennsylvania Department of Conservation and Natural Resources. Kinzua Bridge State Park Master Site Plan. 2010. Accessed January 14, 2026. https://www.dcnr.pa.gov/StateParks/StateParkManagementPlans/Documents/KinzuaBridgeSPMasterPlan.pdf
Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission. “Kinzua Bridge.” Pennsylvania Historical Marker Database. Accessed January 14, 2026. https://explorepahistory.com/hmarker.php?markerId=1-A-25B
Scientific American. “The Kinzua Viaduct, Erie Railway.” Scientific American 47, no. 6 (August 5, 1882): 84–85. Accessed January 14, 2026. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-kinzua-viaduct-erie-railway-1882/
Scranton, William W. Commonwealth of Pennsylvania Legislative Act Authorizing Acquisition of Kinzua Bridge. Harrisburg: Pennsylvania General Assembly, 1963. Digitized copy accessed January 14, 2026. https://www.legis.state.pa.us/WU01/LI/LI/US/HTM/1963/0/0462..HTM
United States Geological Survey. “Kinzua Creek and the Allegheny Plateau: Geologic Context.” Accessed January 14, 2026. https://pubs.usgs.gov/gip/allegheny/
Wallace, Paul A. W. The Indians in Pennsylvania. Harrisburg: Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission, 1981. Context on northern plateau settlement. https://www.phmc.pa.gov/Research/Publications/Documents/Indians%20in%20PA.pdf
Wheeler, Russell. “Storm That Felled Kinzua Bridge Was Rare Tornado.” Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, July 23, 2003. https://www.post-gazette.com/news/state/2003/07/23/Storm-that-felled-Kinzua-Bridge-was-rare-tornado/stories/200307230176
Wikipedia contributors. “Kinzua Bridge.” Wikipedia. Accessed January 14, 2026. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinzua_Bridge
Author Note: I wanted to tell Kinzua’s story from its industrial purpose to its second life as a skywalk and ruin. If you visit, please treat the gorge and the fallen towers with care and respect.