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Truss bridges are some of the most impressive inventions of mankind. These ginormous structures connect one area to another safely and securely. It’s easy to miss the elegance of something as simple as a bridge.
Warren Trusses are commonly used in railway bridges. But why is that? Why is in some designs the Warren Truss favoured over the Pratt or Howe Truss? To get an answer to those questions, we need to understand the structural system and how the loads travel through its different members.
Bridge historians and early textbooks generally call a truss with alternating compression and tension diagonals a Warren; however, sometimes it is called an equilateral truss since all panel lengths and diagonals are of equal length creating a series of equilateral triangles.
Truss bridges became a common type of bridge built from the 1870s through the 1930s. Examples of these bridges still remain across the US, but their numbers are dropping rapidly as they are demolished and replaced with new structures.
A Warren truss, the bridge carries four lanes of U.S. Highway 60 across the Tennessee River near Paducah. The piers were built by C.J. Mahan Construction.
Examples of it can be found everywhere in the world. The Warren Truss uses equilateral triangles to spread out the loads on the bridge. This is opposed to the Neville Truss which used isosceles triangles. The equilateral triangles minimize the forces to only compression and tension.
In structural engineering, a Warren truss or equilateral truss [1] is a type of truss employing a weight-saving design based upon equilateral triangles. It is named after the British engineer James Warren, who patented it in 1848. Wills Creek Bollman Bridge, a short Warren truss bridge of 1871