5 West Virginia Tunnels and Bridges Drivers Underestimate

You cross the same bridge every week.

But you’ve probably never wondered who built it, why it’s shaped that way, or what almost went wrong underneath it.

These are the West Virginia tunnels and bridges drivers underestimate.

1. Silver Memorial Bridge

Silver Memorial Bridge carries U.S. Route 35 across the Ohio River between Point Pleasant and Gallipolis, and if you drive it today, you’re not crossing where the original Silver Bridge stood.

That older bridge collapsed in seconds on a December evening in 1967, killing 46 people when a single steel eyebar failed with no backup structure to catch the load.

The state didn’t rebuild on that same alignment.

Crews raised the replacement about a mile south of Point Pleasant instead, reopening it as the Silver Memorial Bridge in 1969.

You can drive between Point Pleasant and Gallipolis today and never pass the original site at all.

The disaster still shapes an inspection you’d never notice happening around you.

Congress created the National Bridge Inspection Standards afterward, requiring inspectors to examine every public bridge over 20 feet at least once every two years.

Every two years, like clockwork.

2. Wheeling Suspension Bridge

Wheeling Suspension Bridge still looks like a road you could drive across the Ohio River, and for more than 170 years, you could have.

Not anymore.

West Virginia closed the bridge to every car, van, and truck in September 2019 after drivers kept crossing over its posted two-ton limit.

A tour bus that far exceeded that limit had already gotten stuck under the bridge’s safety barrier earlier the same year.

The damage it left behind never fully went away.

Crews finished a $17.9 million rehab in 2024, replacing suspension cables and repainting the span West Virginia opened in 1849 as the longest suspension bridge in the world at the time.

If you’re waiting for that rehab to mean you can drive across again, stop waiting.

West Virginia’s Division of Highways settled the question in February 2026: cars, vans, and trucks won’t cross it again, according to the agency’s announcement.

The state is preserving the span for pedestrians instead, with new lighting and safety signage planned rather than a path back to vehicle traffic.

3. East River Mountain Tunnel

Picture East River Mountain Tunnel closed while you’re hauling a load on Interstate 77, and you’ll understand why truckers treat that possibility as a minor inconvenience.

It isn’t one.

Crews bored more than a mile through solid rock to open the tunnel in 1974, carrying the interstate through the mountain that marks the line between West Virginia and Virginia.

That work cost $40 million overall, the most expensive highway project West Virginia’s Department of Highways had ever undertaken.

Virginia paid its share too, since the state line splits the tunnel nearly in half.

Before the tunnel, you would have crossed that same mountain on a narrow, twisting road built for a much slower kind of traffic.

A tractor-trailer fire shut the whole tunnel down in July 2014, and the northbound bore stayed closed for several days afterward while crews checked for damage.

Drivers took U.S. 460 instead, a narrower road that isn’t built for tractor-trailers.

Three trucks jackknifed on that same detour within the week, which is exactly what waits for you if this tunnel ever closes again.

4. New River Gorge Bridge

New River Gorge Bridge carries U.S. 19 across a canyon 876 feet deep, and you’d have to look straight down to clock the actual drop.

The National Park Service still tracks what crossing that same canyon took before the bridge existed: A 45-minute descent down Fayette Station Road and back up the far side.

You can still drive that old road today, and tourists still do it for the view.

Just not fast.

West Virginia closes the bridge completely once a year, on Bridge Day, when U.S. 19 shuts down so BASE jumpers (parachutists who leap from fixed structures) and rappellers can use the deck instead.

Every vehicle, no exceptions, including yours if you happen to be passing through.

This year that shutdown runs from 7 a.m. to 5 p.m. on October 17, according to the event’s published schedule.

Show up without checking that date first, and you’ll get the exact detour the bridge was built to erase.

5. Wayne Six Toll Bridge

Wayne Six Toll Bridge carries you 160 feet above the Ohio River between Newell, West Virginia, and East Liverpool, Ohio.

You’d assume the state maintains it like every other river crossing you’ve paid for with your gas tax.

You’d be wrong about that too.

West Virginia’s bridge inventory has exactly two toll bridges left in the entire state that are privately owned, and this 1905 suspension span is one of them.

A family company, not the state, decides what you’ll pay to cross and who covers the next repair.

Frank Six of Six Enterprises took over ownership in 2022, and cars and pickups were still paying 75 cents a crossing at the time, with an increase already expected.

Every cent, private.

The bridge carried trolley cars until 1954, when its wooden deck came out for the steel grating you’d cross today.

The Bridge Count Behind This List

You’ve now met five of West Virginia’s crossings, and the Division of Highways maintains 6,636 highway bridges total, according to the department’s published facts sheet.

That’s a lot of bridges for you to have never noticed.

Only four of them run longer than 3,000 feet, and New River Gorge Bridge, the one you already read about, is one of the four.

West Virginia built 60 percent of its highway bridges between 1960 and 1999, so a lot of what you drive over is older than you probably assume.

That makes Wheeling Suspension Bridge, dating to 1849, older than nearly every crossing around it, including the one you probably used to get here.