I've been looking at photos of the original wood truss bridge at Forks Creek, and finding it to be very interesting. All of the other wood Howe truss bridges on the line (and pretty much all others I've noticed) have diagonal compression timbers sloping up to the center (which I think is what defines them as Howe trusses), usually smaller cross diagonals sloping the other way, vertical tension rods, and wood top and bottom chords. This bridge has the diagonal compression timbers sloping up toward the center, but no cross timbers and the bottom chord is pin-connected iron or steel. The rods are in a cross pattern instead of vertical, with the main tension rods being paired (one on each side of each diagonal compression timber, except in the middle where the diagonals from both directions cross) and single intermediate rods running the other direction between them.
This is my interpretation of what I'm seeing in the photos:
When I first started digging though photos I wanted one that shows the bridge from the side. All of the photos I saw in my collection were from the depot end, like this one which has a stupid train blocking the details of the bridge:
I did a web image search, and the only useable photo I found was in the Narrow Gauge Discussion Forum. It turns out that not only did I have that stereo view in my collection, the image on NGDF was from one of my posts. I had cropped it from a stereo view which showed much more of the site (although that crop was larger since the topic dealt more with the depot and eating house), which is why I missed in when I was scanning through my images. While not very clear, in this image, it looks like the top members connecting the two trusses consist of timbers running perpendicular to the sides with diagonal crossed rods between them, while the other photos that show the top have diagonal crossed timbers with rods that are perpendicular to the sides.
This
photo from DPL turned out to be the most useful (used in conjunction with my side view):
Zooming in on the left side shows the pin-connected pieces making up the bottom chord:
Zooming in on the right shows some sort of block between the first diagonal timber and the vertical timbers at the end of the bridge.
Does anyone have any more details on the bridge or any dimensional information?