In 1883, through its subsidiary, the Buffalo, Rochester and Pittsburgh Railroad extended its trackage south from Salamanca to reach the coal fields of Pennsylvania. To accomplish this required bridging the Kinzua Creek Gorge. The R&P used what was, for the time, the world’s highest railroad bridge. Built by the New York, Lake Erie, and Western Railroad and Coal Company, the structure was more than 300 feet above the creek and more than 2,000 feet long. Construction took only 94 days. The single track over the bridge was shared by the Erie and the R&P; this proved to be a bottleneck, and the company which succeeded the Rochester and Pittsburgh Railroad Company, the Buffalo, Rochester and Pittsburgh Railway, built a 40-mile detour, opening it in 1893. The bridge, which carried trains from the Buffalo & Pittsburgh Railroad, was shut down in 1959 and heavily damaged in a 2003 tornado.