Slope bridge
As slope bridge , in Switzerland usually leaning viaduct , one is road or railway bridge referred to on a steep mountain slope overcomes a slope section. If the terrain is unstable, it must be placed on deeply-founded pillars . Due to the special shielding of the piers, landslides can generally no longer harm the bridge.
Long hillside bridges were built in Austria in the mid-1960s during the construction of the Brenner motorway - the most important transit route through the Eastern Alps - in the North Tyrolean Wipptal about 20 km south of the Europabrücke . The longest is the so-called Luegbrücke at 1804 m . It runs along a sliding slope that is up to 50 ° steep, could only be measured with great difficulty and also has some torrent barriers. The bridge is divided into 36 or 72 m long prestressed concrete or steel structures, which are articulated and which were completely renovated in 2002.
The Beckenried viaduct on Lake Lucerne is the largest structure there, at 3,147 m in length. Also worth mentioning is the Chillon Viaduct on Lake Geneva with a length of 2100 m.
The first large slope bridge in Germany was the Krahnenbergbrücke near Andernach from 1961. The 1080 m long structure along the Rhine is part of the federal highway 9 , which has four lanes in the bridge area.
Often slope bridges - like the Luegbrücke - are built at a greater height over a river bed. Very high bridges can possibly be built above the valley shoulders, which are common in alpine locations , if local settlement is not disturbed. Lower bridge sections, on the other hand, can also be poured in from the side for reasons of landscape protection , so that they (such as at Gries am Brenner ) appear externally like a dam .
The safety-related monitoring of slope bridges is nowadays carried out in critical sections with automatic total stations or GPS . Nevertheless, unforeseen damage can occur, such as B. by an overloaded heavy transport in October 2006 on the Tauern motorway near Gmünd in Carinthia .
