Many steel railway bridges have an open deck construction where the secondary load carrying system of the bridge consist of stringers and cross girders including the connections between these. The relevant structural components are located below the bridge deck, making this system difficult to access. Hence, inspecting such bridges in the field requires extensive equipment such as scaffolding, resulting in major costs and traffic downtime to cover all inspections due to the number of bridges in the infrastructure. This paper investigates the use of modal characteristics as a method of bridge inspection. The objective is to establish an efficient approach to identify severe structural faults. In this study, the riveted steel bridge at Hell Bridge Test Arena is used. Based on the results obtained from using accelerometers and a modal hammer, the modal characteristics of key components in the load carrying system is determined and compared to each other.