Bad Säckingen wooden bridge
Coordinates: 47 ° 33 ′ 5 " N , 7 ° 57 ′ 5" E ; CH1903: 638598 / 266,867
| Bad Säckingen wooden bridge | ||
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| use | Cyclist and pedestrian bridge | |
| Crossing of | Rhine | |
| place | Bad Säckingen , Stein | |
| construction | Wood, natural stone, concrete | |
| overall length | 203.70 meters, including canopies 206.50 meters | |
| opening | 1272 | |
| location | ||
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The wooden bridge Bad Säckingen connects the German city Bad Säckingen with the municipality of Stein in Switzerland . With its 203.7 meters (with canopies 206.5 meters) it is the longest covered wooden bridge in Europe. So that it is longer than the Lucerne's Chapel Bridge , which (with canopies 204.7 meters) is 202.9 meters long. The bridge is on the list of cultural assets of national importance in the canton of Aargau .
history
The wooden bridge is first mentioned in the Colmar annals from 1272 and at that time consisted of twelve wooden pillars. According to unconfirmed assumptions, there was a connection across the river at this point 200 years earlier. The wooden bridge was destroyed several times by wars and floods of the Rhine and had to be rebuilt. In 1567 a drinking water pipe was installed from Stein to Säckingen. The longest reconstruction phase lasted from 1570 to 1590 as a result of flooding . A bridge chapel was set up at that time . It was destroyed in 1633 during the Thirty Years War . A Rhine ferry had to take over the transport of goods and people for several years. It was not rebuilt until 1650. In 1678, during the Dutch War , the bridge was destroyed by French troops and rebuilt in 1699. In the Treaty of Lunéville in 1801, Säckingen temporarily came into the possession of the Duke of Modena . At the same time, the Upper Rhine became the state border, and Säckingen town and monastery lost their holdings on the left bank of the Rhine. In 1806 the former Upper Austrian territories fell to the Grand Duchy of Baden . The old wooden bridge, which became the border bridge between Baden and Switzerland, became the property of the Baden state in 1869. The bridge was renovated several times in the 18th and 19th centuries.
The Alte Rheinbrücke , as it is also called, built by Blasius Balteschwiler , was planned to be demolished in 1932. At that time it served as Reichsstraße 34 and from 1949 as Bundesstraße 34 also for motorized traffic. Since 1979, the Fridolinsbrücke, west of the wooden bridge, has been used as a crossing for motorized traffic between Germany and Switzerland (road bridge; part of the German federal highway 518 ). Since then, the wooden bridge has been used exclusively as a cycle path and footpath and became the property of the city of Bad Säckingen (responsible for the road construction work ), but the center of the Rhine and thus the center of the bridge is an international border between the Federal Republic of Germany and the Swiss Confederation. This is shown in the middle of the bridge by a white line ( Fig. )
Between 1960 and 1963, the old brick pillars were replaced by deeper concrete pillars clad with natural stone , as the new power plant in Bad Säckingen sank the water level by more than three meters and deepened the river bed. In 2014, as part of a renovation, it became known that the stone bridge piers had been permanently equipped with explosives until October 2014. In the event of a defense, the Swiss Army would only have had to use fuses to blow up the bridge. Most recently, an explosive charge of presumably several hundred kilograms of TNT was installed in the bridge.
During the Whitsun floods in 1999 , the bridge was almost damaged by driftwood .
On September 4, 2008, Deutsche Post (70 cents) and Swiss Post (1 franc) honored the wooden bridge between Bad Säckingen and Stein with a joint issue in the form of a postage stamp .
On September 2, 2009, the closure for motor vehicles was interrupted for a few hours. The city of Bad Säckingen allowed a traffic jam with over three dozen cars to be staged on the wooden bridge for the shooting of the feature film Der Bad Unkel by Urs Odermatt .
After a renovation in the previous year, the bridge was Baden-Württemberg Monument of the Month April 2015.
construction
Since the piers could only be built flat at the end of the 16th century when the water was low , their location resulted from the flow of the Rhine and the local subsoil conditions. This led to an S-shaped floor plan with irregular spans and significant additional work for the wooden superstructure. The seven openings have spans of 29.10 - 31.10 - 26.21 - 26.61 - 21.19 - 23.14 and 28.06 meters. The supporting structure of the individual fields has a wooden hanging structure . The 3.4 to 5.0 meter wide structure was built with around 520 m³ of oak and spruce wood.
See also
literature
- Jörg Schlaich and Matthias Schüller: Engineer construction manager Baden-Württemberg . Bauwerk Verlag, Berlin 1999, ISBN 3-934369-01-4 .
Web links
- Bad Säckingen wooden bridge. In: Structurae
- History of the Säckinger Rheinbrücke ( Memento from February 13, 2009 in the Internet Archive )
- Bad Säckingen wooden bridge in the inventory of the canton of Aargau
Individual evidence
- ↑ Swiss border bridges full of explosives . swr.de. Retrieved November 16, 2014.
- ↑ Disarmament of explosives: Switzerland removes TNT from bridge to Germany. In: Spiegel Online . November 16, 2014, accessed June 9, 2018 .
- ↑ Images of the Swiss postage stamp Alte Rheinbrücke ( Memento from August 9, 2016 in the Internet Archive )
- ↑ The wooden bridge is Monument of the Month April. In: Badische Zeitung Bad Säckingen from March 31, 2015.
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The next bridge upstream: Laufenbrücke |
Bridges over the Rhine |
The next bridge downstream: Fridolinsbrücke |