Last weekend, there was something quite exciting happening just north of downtown St. Paul. The Maryland Avenue Bridge which has been under construction for several weeks was finally moved into position over I-35E… wait what? Yep, you heard me correctly. Instead of the traditional way of frequently needing to shutdown the traffic below the bridge that was being reconstructed… which wouldn’t work well because it is I-35E, the contractor decided to build the major spans off to the side in a staging area then POOF! And you can watch the video as it happened last weekend moving both spans into place.

Why do I bring this up? Two reasons:

It’s very neat how they actually moved the spans into position like it was a house moving project or something when the spans actually weigh several tons more and are aligned very precisely.

There seems to be a ton more information available about the progress and any construction news concerning this project than many others. Does shutting down or partially closing I-35E effect that many more people than the Central Corridor construction? Probably. But I would think it’s mostly commuters that are more concerned with whether it’s open to traffic or not, not why there was a group of guys standing on the Maryland Bridge for several hours as it was moved into place.