Euphrates Bridge of the Baghdad Railway

Coordinates: 36 ° 49 ′ 49 ″  N , 38 ° 1 ′ 29 ″  E

Euphrates Bridge of the Baghdad Railway
Crossing of	Euphrates
place	Karkamış , Turkey / Jarabulus , Syria
construction	Semi-parabolic beam
overall length	800 m
Number of openings	10
Longest span	80 m
start of building	Summer 1913
completion	April 1915
location

The Euphrates Bridge of the Baghdad Railway ( Turkish Karkamış Köprüsü ) is a single-track railway bridge over the Euphrates between the Turkish town of Karkamış and the Syrian town of Jarabulus , which was previously called Djerablisse .

Geographical location

The 800 m long bridge crosses the Euphrates, which is divided into two arms of roughly the same size by an island at this point, with a series of ten steel semi-parabolic girders, each with a span of 80 m . Today the current is somewhat dammed here by the Tischrin dam .

At the time the bridge was built, both today's Turkey and Syria belonged to the Ottoman Empire . The border between the two states was created after the First World War . It was pulled over long distances - and so here too - immediately south of the course of the railway line. The bridge is located immediately north of the Turkish-Syrian border.

history

The bridge was part of the of Philipp Holzmann as general contractor under the direction of Otto Riese built Baghdad Railway . The steel superstructure was manufactured by the German-Luxembourgish Mining and Hütten-AG , Dortmund Union department and calculated according to the regulations applicable to the Prussian state railways. Production began in the summer of 1913. Between autumn 1913 and late spring 1914, the individual parts were shipped via Bremen to Tripoli in what is now Lebanon, and from there they were transported to the construction site by rail. Since the end of 1913, a senior engineer with a foreman and 15 German workers and 120 local staff had been working on the construction site. When the First World War broke out , four bridges were completed, the fifth under construction. By the convening of a large part of the staff that work had to be interrupted two months, but after that were largely continued as planned. The handover took place on April 30, 1915.

The bridge seems to have weathered the times well. In November 2014, however, train traffic on the Gaziantep –Karkamış– Nusaybin line was discontinued because the traffic directly along the Turkish-Syrian border was considered too dangerous.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b} The railway bridge over the Euphrates as part of the Baghdad Railway. In: Zentralblatt der Bauverwaltung. Volume 35, No. 42 (from May 26, 1915) p. 273 ( digitized version )
2. ^ Onur Uysal: Trains to Nusaybin Stopped on Rail Turkey.org