Empress Elisabeth Bridge (Passau)

Empress Elisabeth Bridge
use	Railway bridge
Convicted	Wels – Passau railway line
Crossing of	Inn
place	Passau
construction	Lattice girder bridge Truss ; bridge
overall length	186 meters
start of building	1860
completion	1861
	location
Coordinates: 48 ° 34 ′ 5 ″ N , 13 ° 27 ′ 21 ″ E

The Kaiserin-Elisabeth-Brücke is a 186-meter-long railway bridge at kilometer 80.316 of the Wels – Passau railway line , which runs across the Inn in Passau . It lies completely on Bavarian territory and after from Bayern originating Empress Elisabeth of Austria named.

history

The bridge, watercolor, ca.1862

The first railway bridge over the Inn in Passau was built between 1860 and 1861 on behalf of the Bavarian Eastern Railway by Joseph Anton von Maffei in his Maffeische workshops in Regensburg and erected on the construction site.

The single-track bridge had a 90.8 m long wrought iron lattice girder , the pillars of which were on the bank or just before the bank in order to avoid the problems associated with the heavy debris and frequent ice drift and not to hinder the shipping and drift that was still common at the time . King Max II. Of Bavaria was in person for the by Friedrich August von Pauli developed and recently in Großhesseloher bridge in the south of Munich successfully executed Pauli carrier occurred, who was regarded as a modern Bavarian development. Nevertheless, the director of the Eastern Railway, Paul Camille von Denis , who was considered an opponent of Paulis, decided in favor of the lattice girder. At that time it was the widest-spanned bridge in Bavaria. Its four corner towers also go back to von Denis. They corresponded to the model of the large Rhine bridges, but were unusual in Bavaria and had no function. On the left bank, a foreland bridge made of five stone segment arches leads the tracks to the high tunnel and the main train station behind it. The right high bank is also connected to the lattice girder bridge with a segment arch.

After its completion, the bridge was leased to the Austrian Empress Elisabeth Railway (KEB), whose Wels – Passau line went into operation on September 1, 1861. The legal successors of KEB are the Austrian Federal Railways (ÖBB).

Shortly after its completion, it was shown by Albert Emil Kirchner in a watercolor that he had painted on behalf of the Ostbahn as part of the cycle Views of localities on the Bavarian Eastern Railways .

During her visits to Passau in 1862 and 1873, Empress Sisi took her train across her bridge.

From 1904 the bridge also served the Passau-Voglau-Hauzenberg railway (granite railway ) . Their trains were initially pushed backwards from the main station over the bridge to the Voglau stop, then forwards on the right bank of the Inn and then along the Danube to the Kräutelstein bridge and on the left bank of the Danube to Erlau , from where it went to Hauzenberg .

In 1938, after the annexation of Austria , the bridge was extended and provided with a steel lattice girder with a curved upper flange for the second track.

On April 30, 1945, two days before the US troops marched in and a few days before the end of World War II in Europe, the bridge was blown up by the Wehrmacht .

During the reconstruction of the bridge, which was important for the replenishment of the US troops, the steel truss with a curved upper chord could be reused. Three of the four bridge towers were blown up during the reconstruction. The original lattice girder was replaced by a 96 m long temporary bridge made of steel trusses with parallel chords. This temporary bridge is still doing its job.

From 2011 to 2014, innovative noise protection measures were carried out on and near the heavily frequented bridge.

The Kaiserin-Elisabeth-Brücke is a listed building .

Web links

Commons : Empress Elisabeth Bridge in Passau - Collection of images

Individual evidence

↑ Description of the VzG route 5831 on via.bahnkonzept.de, accessed on March 29, 2021

↑ Helmut Hilz: The Maffeischen workshops in Regensburg (1853-1881): Shipyard and bridge building workshops on the Lower Wöhrd (PDF).

↑ Historical aerial photo in: Gisa Schäffer-Huber: Passau 1850 to 1930 . Sutton Verlag, Erfurt 2010, ISBN 978-3-86680-582-8 , p. 63 ( limited preview in Google Book search).

↑ Magdalena Hechtel: In the footsteps of Sisi. In: Süddeutsche Zeitung , May 10, 2016.

↑ Ripe for a revitalization - the Hauzenbergerbahn ("Granitbahn") from Passau via Erlau to Hauzenberg on dokumentationszentrum-eisenbahnforschung.org.

↑ Brief history of the Wels - Passau railway line and the Grieskirchen-Gallspach train station with signal box 2 in modellbahn-grieskirchen.at ( Memento from October 6, 2014 in the Internet Archive )