Tarascon – Beaucaire railway bridge
Coordinates: 43 ° 48 ′ 7 ″ N , 4 ° 38 ′ 59 ″ E
| Tarascon – Beaucaire railway bridge | ||
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| Crossing of | Rhone | |
| place | Tarascon , Beaucaire | |
| construction | Arch bridge | |
| overall length | 548 m | |
| width | 9 m | |
| Number of openings | 1 + 7 +1 | |
| Longest span | 60 m | |
| Arrow height | 5 m | |
| Pillar strength | 9 m | |
| start of building | 1847 | |
| completion | 1852 | |
| planner | Paulin Talabot | |
| location | ||
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The railway bridge Tarascon-Beaucaire crosses the Rhone between Tarascon , Bouches-du-Rhône in the region of Provence-Alpes-Cote d'Azur and Beaucaire , Gard in the region Occitania in France .
It is one of the oldest still existing cast iron railway bridges in France.
description
The double-track bridge leads the Tarascon – Sète-Ville railway over the Rhone and the parallel Canal de Beaucaire . It consists of seven segmental arches with spans of 60 m and arrow heights of 5 m, to which a brick arched bridge over the narrow bank streets is connected on both banks. It is a total of 548 m long and 9 m wide.
Since the border of the two departments runs here on the left bank, only the short masonry bridge over the Chemin du Petit Roubian in Tarascon in the area of the Bouches-du-Rhône stands, while the eight pillars with the seven bridge fields and the one on the other Side adjacent arch bridge standing in the area of the Gard department.
Each of the large arches consists of eight parallel cast-iron arch supports, which are arranged at a distance of 1.25 m, only the outermost supports are 1.35 m apart. These beams each consist of 17 parts that are screwed together. On their connecting joints there are cast-iron supports that support the deck girder. The gaps are filled with cast iron moldings. The bridge deck consists of metal plates on which the track superstructure is attached.
The 9 m wide and 21 m long pillars stand on a concrete base that extends down to a depth of 10 m below the water level and was built under the protection of a double ring of piers filled with large stones. From the pillars protrude about 1 m thick fighters , on which the arches are supported.
After the bomb damage of the Second World War , the destroyed bridge fields were rebuilt and the whole bridge was concreted in for reinforcement, so that today its original appearance can only be guessed at.
history
The construction of the bridge goes back to Paulin Talabot , who wanted to develop the coal deposits of Alès (then still Alais ) and La Grand-Combe / Bessèges by means of a train to Beaucaire and supply Marseille with cheap coal. After he had expanded this line in 1840, he received the concession for the line from Avignon via Tarascon and Arles to Marseille in 1843 . This project also included the Tarascon – Beaucaire railway bridge to connect the two lines and transport the coal to Marseille without reloading onto cargo ships. The construction of the bridge planned by him and Desplaces began in 1847, but had to be interrupted for 18 months due to financial problems in connection with the stock market crash in 1847 and the February Revolution in 1848 , so that it could not be opened to traffic until 1852. The cast iron parts were made in the Émile Martin foundry in Fourchambault on the Loire (as was the case with the Nevers railway bridge ) .
On August 6, 1944, the railroad and road bridges were bombed by the Americans. During the reconstruction after the war, the bridge was set in concrete for reinforcement.
Web links
Tarascon railway bridge. In: Structurae
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b Pont de Tarascon . In: Exposition universelle à Philadelphie en 1876. France; Notices sur les Modèls, cartes et Dessins relatifs aux travaux des ponts et chaussées , Ministère des Travaux Publics, Paris 1876, pp. 19–22 ( digitized on Cnum - Conservatoire numérique des Arts et Métiers )
- ↑ The cast-iron arch truss bridges in France. In: Friedrich Heinzerling: The bridges in iron. Verlag von Otto Spamer, Leipzig 1870, p. 109 ( digitized on Google Books)
- ↑ a b Bernard Marrey: Les Ponts Modernes; 18 e –19 e siècles. Picard éditeur, Paris 1990, ISBN 2-7084-0401-6 , p. 156
- ↑ Detailed description in Krach de 1847 in the French Wikipedia
- ↑ Aerial photos of the bomb damage on Matériels terrestres 39/45, Guerre aérienne France