Luokou Railway Bridge
Coordinates: 36 ° 43 ′ 34 ″ N , 117 ° 0 ′ 2 ″ E
| Luokou Railway Bridge 泺 口 黄河 铁路 桥 |
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| use | Railway bridge | |
| Convicted | Beijing – Shanghai railway line | |
| Crossing of | Yellow River | |
| place | Jinan , Shandong , China | |
| construction | Gerber girder - truss bridge | |
| overall length | 1255.2 m | |
| width | 10.8 m | |
| Number of openings | twelve | |
| Longest span | 164.7 m | |
| building-costs | 12 million marks | |
| start of building | 1908 | |
| completion | 1913 | |
| planner | MAN plant in Gustavsburg | |
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The Luokou Railway Bridge , officially the Luokou Railway Bridge over the Yellow River , ( Chinese 泺 口 黄河 铁路 桥 , Pinyin Luòkǒu Huánghé Tiělù Qiáo ) crosses the Yellow River or Huangho near Jinan , the capital of Shandong Province of the People's Republic of China . In German literature it has long been referred to as the Hoangho Bridge .
The Hoangho Bridge, opened in 1913, was built in the course of the construction of the Chinese State Railway Tientsin – Pukow . With its completion, the entire length of this railway line could be put into operation. This also created a connection between Beijing and Nanking and, through the connection to the Trans-Siberian Railway, a rail link between Europe and central China .
It got its current name from Luokou, a place a few hundred meters above the bridge or today's district.
description
With a total length of 1225.2 m, the single-track railway bridge not only crosses the river, but also a wide flood bed. Its steel lattice girders span a total of twelve openings.
The 422.1 m long river bridge is a Gerber girder bridge with a central opening of 164.7 m, which consists of a 109.8 m long suspension girder and the two 27.45 m long cantilevers . The two side openings have spans of 128.7 m each. A foreland bridge with a span of 92.1 m creates the connection to the southern abutment . Eight approach bridges with spans of 92.1 m and 7 × 92.7 m connect to the north.
The pillars are made of concrete clad with natural stone. For the foundation of the pillars, extraordinary measures had to be carried out in order to create a stable foundation with numerous driven piles in the alluvial land consisting of many layers of loess .
The bridge is 10.8 m wide in total. The center distance between the main girders is 9.4 m. It has a track in the middle and next to it two footpaths separated by grids, each 1.75 m wide, and was designed from the outset for a possible expansion to double-track operation. For this, the girders would have had to be reinforced and the footpaths outside of the main girders would have had to be arranged on brackets. But that never happened. Rather, another railway bridge was built 17 km upstream and a new bridge for the Beijing – Shanghai high-speed line opened in 2011 10 km upstream.
history
On the basis of a provisional contract dated May 19, 1899 with the Empire of China under the Qing Dynasty , a German-English company, represented by the German-Asian Bank and the Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corporation , received the license to build a railway between Tientsin ( Tianjin ) and originally Tschinkiang ( Zhenjiang ). Years later, the end point was moved to Pukow ( Pukou ) on the north bank of the Yangtze River , now a district of Nanjing in Jiangsu .
In 1902, the German-Chinese railway company commissioned the "United Machine Factory Augsburg and Maschinenbaugesellschaft Nürnberg A.-G., branch office Gustavsburg" with the necessary preparatory work in order to obtain the necessary information about the nature of the soil, water levels, water quantities, floodplains etc. for a bridge of this size . Those involved knew that the river broke through about 28 km further below its dykes in 1898 and covered about 300 km² with a 0.6 to 3 m thick layer of loess . After long explorations, the location of the construction site near Luokuo was selected, where the rocky Queshan hill ( Que Hill , 鹊山) to the north and the stone setting of the Luokuo dike on the south side offered at least some certainty that the Yellow River was its diked flood bed would not leave.
In 1904, the German-Chinese railway company issued a limited tender for the planning and construction of the bridge, at which the Gutehoffnungshütte (Sterkrade bridge construction department), the AG for iron industry and bridge construction formerly Johann Caspar Harkort (Duisburg), the MAN (Gustavsburg plant ), Union AG (Dortmund) and Vereinigte Königs- and Laurahütte (Königshütte, Upper Silesia) took part.
MAN was awarded the contract. The design provided for a Gerber girder bridge with a main opening of 128.7 m and a total of 21 openings including the approach bridges. The center distances of the main girders were planned to be 4.8 m. However, work could only begin after the design had been approved by the German Empire. During the Russo-Japanese War (1904–1905) there were no discussions about the draft. Subsequently, the discussions mainly dealt with the fears of the population that the bridge construction could trigger a new, catastrophic dike breach, and with their fear of the anger of the river god, which is aroused by the installation of the pillars.
As a result, a new design for a bridge was created, the abutments of which were no longer integrated into the dikes and which had fewer pillars. For the larger spans required for this, a higher and, because of the wind loads, also wider supporting structure had to be planned, which in turn led to provisions for later double-track traffic.
On January 13, 1908, a new contract was signed that took these changes into account. The first groundbreaking for the railway took place on June 30, 1908 near Tientsin. The planning of the bridge was carried out entirely by the MAN plant in Gustavsburg, the production of the steel elements of the bridge was divided into one third each between the MAN plant in Gustavsburg, GHH and Dortmunder Union. The central opening was cantilevered , all other openings were mounted on scaffolding. The work proceeded without any problems under the eyes of the more than skeptical population. The unfinished structure also withstood the floods of 1910, which remained only one meter below its absolute maximum, and the mighty ice drift of January 1911 without any significant damage. The political upheavals of those days with the end of the Qing dynasty and the proclamation of the republic by Sun Yat-sen do not seem to have significantly influenced the progress of the construction work.
The last rivet was struck on November 12, 1912 in an opening ceremony. The later Reich Minister of Transport Julius Dorpmüller , who was the top manager of the state railway at the time, paid tribute to the achievements of the engineers and workers involved in the construction in a speech on this occasion.
During the armed conflicts up to the founding of the People's Republic of China in 1949, the bridge was repeatedly damaged by explosions and artillery fire and then repaired. During the great flood of 1958, Prime Minister Zhou Enlai rushed to the bridge to encourage work to save it from the flood. A memorial at the south end of the bridge commemorates his inspection visit. In the years 1959 and 1998 to 2000 extensive renovation measures were carried out.
literature
- Schweizerische Bauzeitung , 62nd half-volume (2nd half of 1913), No. 25 (from December 20, 1913), p. 343, p. 345. (with illustrations based on photos that were probably taken before completion)
- Bruno Schulz: The Hoangho Bridge. In: Journal of the Association of German Engineers , 58th year 1914, pp. 241–249, pp. 289–297, pp. 332–340, pp. 367–379.
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ Bruno Schulz: The Hoangho Bridge. (see literature )
- ^ Alfred Gottwaldt: Dorpmüller's Reichsbahn. The era of the Reich Minister of Transport Julius Dorpmüller 1920–1945 . EK-Verlag, Freiburg 2009, ISBN 978-3-88255-726-8 , p. 14 f.