Hey – what are you doing right now? Look, whatever it is, it just doesn’t matter unless you are actively pursuing bridge opportunities. Maybe you call them bridgeortunities? It doesn’t matter what you call it, the point is at every waking moment, if you’re a success-minded human, you should be seeking out as many bridge opportunities as possible, and making those bridges happen! There are gullies and gulches and streams and rivers and gorges that need to be spanned, and unless go-getters like yourself are out there finding bridge opportunities, they will remain tragically unspanned. We can’t let that happen.
That’s why I’d like you to see this incredible bridge opportunity that was spotted on Facebook Marketplace, in the hopes that you can get down to the exciting business of bridging!
Even better, it’s school bus-based! Which is how I can justify writing about it here, even though my true goals are getting as many bridge opportunities out to all of you as possible! Bridges, people, bridges! They’re the NFTs of the modern era, only even better. Here, look at the ad:
Look at that! This really is a great bridge opportunity! Look how bridge-y that school bus has become! It’s bridging the everloving crap out of that stream! Damn!
Let’s see what the seller has to say about this bridgeotunity:
Good condition- has been parted out, would be great for a bridge or for possible other uses. 38′ long. Moving not included and you will need a way to load it.
Heavy duty frame.
You are just buying the body and frame- all doors, glass, roof hatches, axles, driveshafts, fuel tank, etc. Will be removed prior to pick up. Photos show some ideas for a school bus bridge that were found on the internet.
Woah woah woah whoa. Hold up there – those pics of fantastic school bus bridges aren’t what I’m getting? They just found them on the – what’s it called – inter-net? Isn’t that the same place where they have all those pictures of penises and kittens and where the Juicero was from?
So, what are you getting in this ad? Looks like it’s this:
A gutted school bus. For $900, and you have to figure out how to get it out of there.
My first reaction, I’ll admit, is disappointment. I was promised a bridge opportunity here, people, and I’m just seeing a hollowed-out shell of a school bus?
Then I remembered something important about those of us in the bridge opportunist community: if you can’t see bridge potential in damn near anything, then maybe you don’t have what it takes to be a true bridgeotunist. And, mothergrabbers, I am all about the bridgeotunities.
So, with that in mind, hell yeah this could be a stellar bridge opportunity! You have what is basically a big steel tube with a mostly flat floor – that’s halfway to bridge right there. Do you own a pair of closely set skyscrapers or towers? If so then, buddy, you’ve basically got a ready-made skyway (itself just a type of bridge!) right here, one simple helicopter or crane trip away from the dream.
Are you chasm-adjacent? Know of a tempting ravine? Have a cleft in mind? A gap, a fissure, a lava pool, a trough? Bridge the fuck out of it! Bridge it, bridge it, bridge it! Buy this gutted school bus and put one end on land, put the other end on land, and let the glorious void exist underneath! Defy gravity’s cruel hand with a couple thousand pounds of bus-steel! Spit in the face of the Almighty himself as you reach across impassible divides with your bus of bridging! You are as a god now!
A god of bridging! For just $900 and a way to haul that thing out of the woods!
Bridge! Bridge like the wind!
(Top image: Facebook Marketplace)
I’ve heard lunch buddies babbling about bridge financing and nodded and never had a fucking clue of what it was. Well now I can add a knowing smile to the nod. Thanks Torch.
I expect the seller will end up paying $900 to have it removed.
Loading, moving, unloading, modifying, and situating a bus would probably cost more than just buying a prefab bridge.
I mean, it makes total sense that prefab bridges are a thing… I just never THOUGHT about them being a thing.
This whole situation here is making me really want to start looking around the woods on my property to see if there’s anything I can bridge!
Do it!
I’ve been thinking about putting in a couple of zip lines over a particularly boggy part of our property. One for each direction. Lol
A troll and some billy goats all get on a bus…
Sounds like an overrated Netflix show. 😛
Maybe you could get a BOGO deal with the Hawaii bus?
The bridge is in GA. I’m in NY.
It may as well be in Arnhem.
i can’t stop visualizing crashing it into position across the gap.
hold my beer.
Obviously these guys will loan you the money. https://ir.bridgeig.com/news-events/press-releases/detail/77/bridge-investment-group-announces-key-developments-in-its
They probably alreadyhave a printout of the ad hanging in their break room.
bridge loans are pretty common
I live in the middle of a college town. My house has a creek behind it, about a bus-width wide, and the house on the other side is abandoned. I was thinking zip-line, but a bus bridge could work!
It has a roof and sides as well, so I would have to call it bridge & tunnel.
A covered bridge! Just like great-grandma use to make with those old horse-drawn buses!
Wrong county. Now, if you moved it to Madison County (don’t care what state), you’d be set with your very own Bridge of Madison County.
My work does a lot of trail/creeks/pond projects and we’ve installed a few bridges in these projects. All of them involve the local conservation authorities to some degree because bridges cross watercourses. I can only imagine their heads exploding if we proposed something like this as an alternate.
Yes, unless you are well into the sticks crossing watercourses involves conservation to some degree where I live.
I think even if you are in the sticks, it does. But if you’re far enough out and own the land on both sides I’d be willing to bet these get put up without any permitting whatsoever, ask forgiveness instead of permission type stuff.
It’s a fairly cheap way to get myself killed, but not the cheapest. I’ll have to pass.
The bus body could make for a decent storage unit if you put doors on either end of it and kept the windows in place. With nesting boxes and chicken wire you could also make a deluxe chicken coop that your uncle Cletus would be proud of.
cant be a coupe, only one door
Don’t give ideas to the current administration to fix our infrastructure. They are penalizing the secretary of education, might as well take the buses. Sponsored by DOGE
Step 1: Buy bus bridge
Step 2: Confidently say, “and if you believe that, I have a bridge I can sell you” as many times as you want and mean it every time.
Step 4: Profit
What happened to step 3? Insurmountable financial loss?
I’m fairly certain step 3 is implied to be “…” at this point.
You ever read a word too many times it starts to not make sense? Bridge.
Can I get an abridged version of this article?
I feel like someone bought a cheap used bus to get the engine and transmission from it, but they really didn’t think through the plan well enough to figure out how to get rid of the rest of it. They should have offered it as free scrap, but they decided to try to find a creative way to get someone to give them money.
I looked into using a railroad flat car as a bridge for a property I was going to build on. It’s a thing. There’s a company that that sells retired flat cars just for this purpose for like $10k. With the proper engineering, they can handle the weight of a loaded firetruck (the requirement for a residential bridge). An actual made for the purpose bridge could cost 10 times that.
That’s a hell of a deal
I’ve been looking into the idea of repurposing coal cars to move aggregate, it seems like a cheap way to go, until you realize they can’t handle as much weight and most of them on the second hand market are already mostly through their service lives, but it can be done and is a lower up front cost
For $900 I wouldn’t even need to get a bridge loan!
But you’ll still need GAP insurance!
A true bridgeortunist sees multiple busses in the ad photo and knows the real opertunity is a bus bridge highway with tolls. Make money while you sleep.
The Bridges of Methison County
COTD
Glorious post.
I know someone who found a NOS WWII Bailey Bridge still in its original packing crates and put it up on his property. Very unique for today and at least it was meant to be a bridge.
This is EXACTLY what David Tracy needs to bridge the gap in his mind between “family oriented vehicle” and “1996 XJ with unobtanium parts”
haha. Such a stretch. But a good one!
I picture you and ENHRN moving to a more rural setting, and this covered bridge of destiny is how you enter the property.
I’m not sure it’s long enough…
We could find a second bus, then pile all of David’s non-running projects up as a support column for where the buses meet.
David lives in California so we’ll probably need to tether the two buses together with bungee cords and ratchet straps for seismic resilience.
They’re all in the back of the J10, just waiting for this exact moment.
Oh yeah, it’s all coming together.
We used two 53′ flat deck trailers
This post needed more Glengarry Glen Ross. Always. Be. Bridging.
I’m sorry, that’s just a bridge too far. Not sure I could trust that bridge over troubled waters.
we don’t need no stinking building codes or permits. No gobernmn’t will keep us safe against our will.
If it’s on my land for my personal use, what business is it of anyone else’s? If I want to kill myself doing something stupid, so be it.
Railroad flatcars make much better bridges – but are a LOT harder to move around:
https://www.freightwaves.com/news/after-hurricane-old-railcars-find-new-life-as-bridges-in-north-carolina
But for light-duty use as shown with ATVs and snowmobiles, this looks like it would work just fine. It’s not big enough to drive a car through. Though it probably has a higher weight capacity than a lot of purpose-built rotted out old bridges on country roads. At least until it is neglected for a few decades.