Upside Down Bridge
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The picture above is a view overlooking Lockport's famous "Flight of Five" looking east. The railroad bridge you see crossing the canal in the distance doesn't look like most other bridges. Trains cross this bridge on the very top, and the trusswork that gives the bridge strength between supports is beneath the tracks, rather than above. This makes the bridge appear to have been built upside-down.
Tour guides at the site like to explain the unusual bridge by saying that because railroads were in competition with the canal for freight cargo business, they used the hanging bridge trusswork as a way to limit the size of ships that could navigate on the canal. If you visit Lockport and hear this on one of the tours, don't believe it. The real reason is far less interesting, but much more sensible. Bridge truss-work is built above the traffic - in this case the railroad - only when there's not enough room underneath the bridge to do it this way. Building it above means that the bridge has to be wider to accomodate both the traffic AND the truss-work. That means more material and higher building costs. Here the distance from the water to the railroad bed was far enough to allow the railroad to save some money by building a narrower bridge with the truss-work below, with plenty of room to spare for canal traffic.
In case you're still not convinced, consider the highway bridges you see in the distance in this shot taken from the top of the "upside down" bridge. The railroad engineers weren't stupid. They knew that they didn't have to worry about huge ships on the Erie, as the waterway was crossed by hundreds of bridges like these with clearances that were in every case much lower than any they could ever create with their railroad bridge here at Lockport.
