Meuse tunnel
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The Maastunnel is a road tunnel that crosses under the two banks of the Nieuwe Maas , a main arm of the Rhine-Maas Delta , in Rotterdam .
Including the entrances, the tunnel is 1070 meters long, the closed part alone is 550 meters. In addition to pedestrians, cyclists and motorcyclists, the tunnel, built between 1937 and 1942, is used by around 75,000 cars every day. (Architects: JP van der Bruggen, AJ van der Steur)
history
Although the residents and urban developers of Rotterdam generally agreed before construction that a new fixed crossing of the Meuse would be necessary to cope with the increasing traffic in the city, the construction of the Meuse tunnel was preceded by heated discussions. The main controversial issue was whether this crossing should be designed as a bridge or a tunnel.
In the end, the municipality decided on a tunnel, as a bridge would have needed more than 60 meters in height so as not to obstruct shipping traffic in the port of Rotterdam, which would have made it even more expensive than a tunnel. So they decided to build the first car tunnel in the Netherlands.
Even during the occupation of Rotterdam by the Wehrmacht, construction continued. The German administration wanted to stage the opening as a great spectacle, although the population did not feel like it two years after the bombing of the city. The two boys Joop Otte and Cor Wigman disavowed the opening. When the officials were ready to open the tunnel, the two of them appeared from the tunnel on their bicycles. They had crept into the tunnel on the other side of the river and already crossed it.
In 1944 the city decided to make the tunnel passable for the use of trolleybuses as well, laying cables for this purpose, but these were never used. Towards the end of the Second World War, the Wehrmacht provided the lines with explosives in order to blow up the tunnel, but this did not take place, probably because the Dutch resistance had defused the explosives beforehand.
construction
The tunnel was built using the lowering method, because the geographic conditions of Rotterdam made it impossible to build the tunnel into a previously built pit, as each pit would fill up with groundwater within hours. With the method, individual tunnel segments were made in a dry dock , brought to their later place of use and sunk into the ground there. The tunnel is the first tunnel of the lowering method, the cross section of which is rectangular. Previously only sunken tunnels were built, the cross-section of which was round. A method that was then used in numerous other tunnels in the Netherlands. One segment is 60 meters long, nine meters high and 25 meters wide. There are a total of four of these tubes under the Meuse: two for motorized traffic and two for cyclists and pedestrians, which can be reached by escalators. In one of the ventilation buildings there is an air quality control building.
The deepest point of the tunnel is about 20 meters below sea level . Above ground you can see the course of the tunnel by the two ventilation buildings on the banks of the Nieuwe Maas.
Web links
Coordinates: 51 ° 54 '0.6 " N , 4 ° 28' 4.9" E