Buffered by Steel, Concrete and Collaboration, a Railroad Bridge Becomes a Kansas City Public Gathering Space

Mike Zeller recalls the pivotal moment in 2007 when he rode on a friend’s motorboat up the Kansas River. “We were seeing the city from the river, which was rare,” he says. “We were going under a lot of bridges. I saw this abandoned railroad bridge just sitting there. It looked big and beefy. I thought: ‘Someone ought do something with it.’”

He would spend the next decade trying to do something with the century-old Rock Island Bridge between Kansas City, Kan., and Kansas City, Mo. Initial concepts included a restaurant called “Chicken on a Bridge,” Zeller says, recalling how the mayor at the time “called me Chicken Boy.”

“I went to high school in one of the river valleys. We would hang out on a railroad bridge,” Zeller says. “Even in college, we’d meet up there over the Missouri River.” With the Kansas City River being muddy and lowland, "it didn’t get a lot of attention… I had a broad yearning to do more with the river.”

Finally, he founded Flying Truss, LLC, in 2017, and developed a public-private partnership with the Unified Government of Wyandotte County and Kansas City, Kan., which bought the bridge from its Missouri namesake city and granted the company a 66-year-term lease to convert and operate the structure, which now has 35,000 sq ft of venue space, including a two-story restaurant (called The River House rather than Chicken on a Bridge).

“Kansas City, Kansas, asked if we wanted to do a P3,” recalls Zeller. “They were building levee-top trails on both sides.” He notes the many concepts that came and went, such as considering the bridge as a town square, as part of a trail system, as a space for food vendors working out of shipping containers. “There were things we didn’t yet understand. There was no template for this,” he says.

The project became a community effort. Zeller sought advice from city engineers and from Dennis Strait, principal emeritus with Gould Evans, now Multistudio. He cobbled together funds from the city, the state commerce department, the Kansas Dept. of Transportation, loans and philanthropic donations. “Thirty-five companies donated materials and labor. A local law firm did pro bono work for 7 years,” he says.

Construction began in 2023. L.G. Barcus and Sons, Inc. completed the new approximately $16-million bridge entertainment venue for an April opening. The Unified Government and Kansas City is still completing a $10-million effort to complete a trail system and access ramps on the bridge’s west side, contingent on the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers completing a levee expansion project along the river. These components are expected to be done by this fall.

“We specialize in railroad bridges,” says Daniel Gibson, vice president, structures division with Barcus. “We have converted bridges to walking trails in the past—but nothing like this.”

Converting the Bridge

A 2016 engineering report from TranSystems found that the bridge can hold 3.16 million lb. “We chose to utilize TranSystems which was familiar with the structure and had performed maintenance on it,” says Matt Farber, senior principal with Thornton Tomasetti, the structural engineer. There were some minor retrofits, such as replacing missing bolts or addressing rust. TT did analyses of the loads of the new structural components and lateral forces such as wind.

“The actual railroad [bridge] is pretty narrow,” Farber notes. The design called for 15-ft cantilevers on either side of the 18-ft-wide bridge to create more real estate, and galvanization of the beams for the restaurant’s second story on the center span. “On the lower level, we utilize weathering steel. The cantilever itself functioned well because the trusses had enough capacity.” Nevertheless, “one of the unique things we had to think about is how the bridge is loaded. What happens if everyone goes to one side looking at fireworks?” he adds.

Multistudio met with Barcus and two other contractors to gather their ideas about construction, says Strait. The bridge, about 60 ft above the river, originally had two 300-ft steel trusses, with a third 100-ft western truss added in the mid-1900s, he says. “The central span is where the event center is now,” he says. The team had to figure out “how to get public trails through there, how to build under the trusses without covering them up.” The developer suggested the second story for the restaurant’s private functions, which left the main level with almost 50 ft of public space.

Crews added some 680,000 lb of steel to reinforce the structure, says Gibson. “All the beams for the walking surface add up to 1 million lb of steel. We set the beams to make the cantilevers over each side.” Barcus removed 1,400 ft of old rail with a total weight of more than 50 tons and almost 700 tons of concrete. All construction was done on the bridge, because the river is too shallow for barges and cranes, he adds.

Cantilevers were built on either side of the bridge to create more community space.
Photo courtesy Thornton Tomasetti

In a June news release in 2023, Barcus described the major components of the bridge structural work: Elevating the three trusses—the central truss the most, at 3 ft, 4 in.—to meet 750-year flood standards and match the Corps’ new levees. Barcus was the original contractor for the lift gate systems installed in 1952 after flooding, and reused those systems to raise the bridge 71 years later.

“Barcus employed new motors along with the original 1950s gears and mechanisms to lift the bridge to its new height,” the release states. Gibson noted that much of the original equipment is in good condition because it remained well-greased. "We're replacing 70-year-old grease with new grease.”

He notes the challenge of installing new steel beams into place. “We were swinging them 180° from within the truss,” he says. “We ran cables for fall protection. It was like a jungle gym.” The longest four beams, around 60 ft, are at the stairwells and entrances to the upper deck, with quarter-inch tolerances. “The heaviest member we picked was around 26,000 lb,” he adds.

Crews only had access from one side and dealt with high winds as they placed 932,000 cu yd of concrete 6 days a week, 10 hours a day at peak, he adds.

The bridge is part of the High Line Network, inspired by the railroad-turned-elevated park in New York City. “They provided emotional support as much as anything,” Zeller says, noting that “the P6 [public-private-philanthropic-people-purpose-process] we did here is novel.” He cites further inspiration from traveling in Europe and seeing private investments in public areas.

“I’ve worked on a lot of challenging renovation projects,” says Farber. “This was unique—and will probably be copied. There is a number of abandoned railroad bridges in this country that have a lot of structural capacity.”

Zeller says that Flying Truss LLC is eying opportunities in other cities. “We have a starter list of 22 bridges.”

Aileen Cho, ENR's deputy editor for infrastructure, is a born-again Angeleno and recovering New Yorker. She studied English and theater at Occidental College, where a reporter teaching the one existing journalism course encouraged her to apply for the LA Times Minority Editing Training Program. Her journalism training led to her first stories about transportation, working as a cub reporter with the Greenwich Time. She has been honored, solo or with ENR colleagues, with several journalism awards. For ENR, she has traveled the world, clambering over bridges, touring airports, and descending into tunnels. She is a regular at transportation conferences, where she finds that airport and mass transit engineers really know how to have fun (bridge engineers aren't far behind). She is always eager to hop on another flight because there are so many interesting projects and people, and she gets tired of throwing her cats off her computer in her home office in Eagle Rock, California. She is a very conflicted Mets/Dodgers fan.