Photo courtesy of the Warren County Historical Society This undated photo shows the stone bridge over Morrison Run serving its intended purpose.

Modern bridges seem to last 50 to maybe 100 years,

Even brick streets — the oldest we have dating to the 1920s and 1930s — are now like driving on choppy open water in a boat.

So if we told you that there is an active piece of transportation infrastructure in Warren County that remains in service and is 160 years old this year — predating the Civil War — we’d probably catch your interest, right?

It certainly caught ours!

Photo from the Library of Congress This is a map of the original Sunbury and Erie Railroad published in Philadelphia in 1854.

It’s the stone train bridge over Morrison Run.

There’s surprisingly little written about the bridge, so we’ve pulled from a myriad of sources to piece together how the bridge came to be, what railroad plan it was initially a part of, and how it fits into the railway system today.

The bridge was initially part of the Sunbury & Erie Railroad, the oldest chartered railroad in the U.S. It’s goal, as the name implies, was to link Sunbury, Pa., and Erie with a single rail line through much of the central part of the state.

That charter was issued in 1837 and surveying for the line occurred in 1838, 1839, and 1852. The project grew in fits and starts – national economic problems, financiers dying, to name a couple – and the project died out

That 1852 surveying was part of a re-birth of the effort that was centered in Warren — Thomas Struthers (think Library Theatre, Wells, etc.) — in 1851.

Some of the eastern part of the line was in construction in 1853 and in use by 1854. The Erie to Warren section — which cost over $50 million — wouldn’t be graded and ready for rails until the spring of 1859.

Construction of the bridge over Morrison Run was completed in 1860.

The keystone identified that J.E. Bering as the principal engineer with T.J. Hockinson as the engineer in charge for the firm Struthers & Co. Contractors, which evidently completed the work.

J. Edward Bering, the principal engineer on the project, is known for a much more famous project: He constructed the Horseshoe curve, outside of Altoona.

According to The Railway and Engineering Review, Bering’s engineering career kicked off in 1848.

“He attained the grade of principal assistant in the civil engineering department, in which capacity he laid out the Horseshoe curve, previous to his resigning from that company’s service to become associated with the Erie Railroad,” that report stated. “During his lifetime, he also served in engineering capacities on the Bald Eagle Valley, the Sterling Mountain, the St. Croix & Lake Superior, the Allegheny Valley, the Boston Hartford & Erie, the New York Central, the New York New Haven & Hartford, and the Pekin Lincoln & Decatur lines.”

He died in 1915 and, in a very ironic twist, was killed when a vehicle he was in was struck by a train.

John McLaughlin, who came to the U.S. from Ireland in 1848, is identified as the master stone mason on the project.

The year after the Morrison Bridge was completed — 1861 — the line fell into financial difficulties and was absorbed by the state as part of the Pennsylvania Railroad. It’s likely the Civil War had something to do with that.

The state changed the name to the Philadelphia and Erie Railroad in 1861 and executed a 999-year lease for its use between the Pennsylvania Railroad and the Philadelphia Railroad.

The line was completely open to traffic by October 1864 and became part of the Penn Central line in 1907.

The bridge now carries the Buffalo & Pittsburgh Railroad over Morrison Run.