So total thread necro. I am STILL trying to do this.
On bridge #2 (the blue railroad flatbed car in the photos above), I actually ended up doing that whole thing myself in DEC21. My gravel pit guy let me come out and get a bunch of demo concrete for free, so I was able to do riprap on that one and that has held up well. At the same time, I tore the entire top off that bridge and replaced it with treated 2bys, a roof sheathing layer on top of that, tar paper and rolled roofing on top of that. I was gonna just leave that as is, but the cows started destroying it pretty quick when they showed up in the Spring, which gave me the "Aha" moment of why the previous owner had road mix spread on top. So I did that too and it's holding up pretty nicely. The idea of the treated wood topped by the sheathing is that when the cows start to destroy stuff, I'm hoping the sheathing will act as ablative armor and I can just replace that before they start destroying the base layer. I think that's what the previous owner did as well, but he never replaced the sheathing as it broke, so all the railcar "flooring" got damaged as well before I ever got here. But anyway, a lot of work, but it's done and I'm happy with it so far.
My culvert road is a whole nother story. The structural engineer drew up some good plans, and recommended a contractor who could do the work. The contractor came out initially to get info for an estimate, then never showed up again. A half year of phone tag with his son, and then I learned that the old man retired, gave the business to his son, and the son just takes the crew fishing all the time and they just work whenever.
So then I get back with the engineer and he doesn't know anyone else, then I start calling around, but everyone said they don't do that kind of work. In the meantime, this last DEC, somehow so much water came down the road that one of the timbers above the culvert pipe cracked. You can see in the above photo that there's a timber that looks warped. It cracked and sank like six inches. So now I'm at the point where the original fix of pumping concrete in to fill voids and create a stable wall won't work anymore.
In desperation a few weeks ago, I called the local irrigation district, and the superintendent was super cool and drove out to my place (he lives 15 minutes away) to have a look. His district literally ends ten feet from my culvert pipe, so he actually has a reason for concern if my road collapses during the irrigation season. Anyway, he was able to find me a guy, since they obviously have a lot of culverts in their district. So the good news is that I have a guy now. He's going to tear out the whole crossing, install a new pipe (going from 4' to 5') and do an upstream concrete wall with wings to funnel the water through.
The bad news is that it's already too late for him to do the work before the irrigation season (he needs super low water and will be running big ass pumps for 48 hours straight to divert water during the wall construction). So it's gonna be NOV-DEC before it gets done. The badder news is that I just got off the phone with him and I'll be out $47K. So much for buying guns this year.
The even worse news is that I was really, really, stupid, and because I wanted to protect the crossing from more collapse in the meantime, was down in the creek most of today stacking 40 sacks of quickcrete as riprap to keep the culvert bank from degrading more during the irrigation season and possibly collapsing the crossing. Man, that was sketchy. Absolutely stupid of me to do it without a safety watch. Everytime I saw some dirt trickling when I put a sack in place, I was thinking the whole thing was gonna come down and bury me. Stupid. Stupid. Stupid. Stupid. At least I got my strength training workout in for the day.
