Edea Bridge

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Coordinates: 3 ° 48 '24 "  N , 10 ° 7' 32"  E

Edea Bridge
Edea Bridge
Crossing of Sanaga
place Edéa , Cameroon
construction Truss arch bridge
overall length 160 m
width 8.5 m
Number of openings a
Longest span 160 m
completion 1911
location
Edea Bridge (Cameroon)
Edea Bridge
Pont allemand edea.jpg
The bridge seen from the river, in the background the dams of the aluminum company Alucam
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The Edea Bridge is a former railway bridge that spans the southeast arm of the Sanaga River near the city of Edéa in Cameroon .

The 160 meter long and 8.5 m wide steel truss arch bridge is now used by pedestrians, cyclists and moped riders, after a road bridge and a railway bridge were built right next to it. Its two river pillars now also support the old railway bridge.

history

The single-track bridge was built in 1911 during the German colonial days of Cameroon as part of the Cameroonian Mittellandbahn , which ran from Douala via Edéa to Éséka . Further work there was interrupted by the First World War. While the flat northern arm of the Sanaga could be crossed by a bridge with four openings with spans of 56 m each, only a bridge without a river pillar came into question for the southern arm, which is up to 26 m deep during the annual floods. Its span of 159.6 m is larger than that of the Victoria Falls Bridge with 156.5 m and was the largest in Africa when it opened.

It was designed and manufactured in Germany by Gutehoffnungshütte in Oberhausen and set up on a trial basis before it was transported in individual parts to Cameroon. One half of the bridge was vorgebaut from the shore, while the other half on barges has been mounted and then floated.

When the Goethe-Institut in the Cameroonian capital Yaoundé celebrated its 50th anniversary in 2011 , the 100-year-old bridge was declared a “cultural bridge” and a symbol of the German-Cameroonian cultural exchange. Larger- than-life concrete figures were placed on top of it as part of an art project led by Pascale Marthine Tayou .

Web links

Commons : Bridge of Edea  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Franz Baltzer : The colonial railways with special consideration of Africa . Göschen'sche Verlagshandlung, Berlin-Leipzig 1916, p. 74 f, with illustrations on p. 69, 73; Reprint-Verlag-Leipzig, Holzminden, ISBN 978-3-8262-0233-9 .
  2. ↑ Philipp Stein: 100 years of GHH bridge construction . Gutehoffnungshütte Oberhausen, Sterkrade plant, Oberhausen 1951, p. 135 .
  3. ^ The project Kulturbrücke 2011 of the Goethe Institute Cameroon
  4. ^ Bridge on the river: "Goethe" project in Cameroon on dw-world.de
Arch bridge, road bridge and railway bridge, in front of it the figures of the art project