Pont Régemortes
Coordinates: 46 ° 33 ′ 42 ″ N , 3 ° 19 ′ 23 ″ E
| Pont Régemortes | ||
|---|---|---|
-2.jpg) |
||
| use | Road bridge | |
| Crossing of | Allier | |
| place | Moulins , Allier department | |
| construction | Stone and concrete arches | |
| overall length | 300 m | |
| width | 13.60 m | |
| Number of openings | 13 | |
| Longest span | 19.50 m | |
| start of building | 1753 | |
| completion | 1763 | |
| planner | Louis de Régemortes | |
| location | ||
|
||
The Pont Régemortes is a bridge over the Allier in Moulins in the Allier department in the French region of Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes . It is the only road bridge that connects Moulins to the left bank. Only a railway bridge built in 1855 around 850 m upstream crosses the river in the city area.
It bears the name of its builder Louis de Régemortes , also Louis de Règemorte, a member of the Corps des ingénieurs des ponts et chaussées . It is therefore also called Pont Règemorte .
description
The over 300 m long stone arch bridge consists of thirteen identical basket arches with spans of 19.50 m each. The bridge is a total of 13.60 m wide. The bridge deck, which is horizontal over its entire length, is divided into three lanes and one walkway each. The peculiarity of the bridge lies in its foundation on a wide base plate that extends from bank to bank, which is clearly visible when the water level is not too high. With this base plate, it was possible to successfully prevent the pillars from being washed away.
history
In Moulins there have been various wooden and stone bridges over the Allier over the years. This river, coming from the Massif Central , with its torrential floods had washed away the bridges again and again after a short time, for example in 1676. A stone bridge built in 1685 was destroyed again in 1689. Hardouin-Mansard had started building a new stone bridge in 1705, which was almost finished in 1710. Only the falsework had to be removed when a flood also tore this bridge away.
Against this background, Régemortes, who was commissioned to build a new bridge, made unusually extensive and careful preliminary investigations. He found out that the river ran on a sand bed more than 15 m deep, so that even a pile foundation could not reach the natural ground with the means available at the time. That is why the pillars were repeatedly scoured and washed away in the past . Régemortes found that it was a very homogeneous sand that had a high compressive strength if it was prevented from moving sideways. He therefore had a massive, horizontal base plate walled across the entire river, which was considerably wider than the future bridge. Several rows of stakes under the slab prevented the sand from being washed away under the slab. At both ends of the river, steps sloping towards the middle of the river ensured that scouring was also prevented at the edge dikes. The bridge piers were then not individually founded on pile grating, but instead were built on this continuous base plate. Régemortes planned the pillars and arch openings in such a way that the flow cross-section was significantly larger than that of the Hardouin-Mansard bridge, even during floods, and so the water pressure on the bridge remained as low as possible.
Régemortes presented the Terms of Reference in November 1752 finished. The construction work he directed began in 1753 and was completed in 1763. It has survived all floods since then and is still the only road bridge between Moulins and the west bank of the river.
Louis de Régemortes described the construction of the bridge and the problems encountered in detail in the work Description du nouveau pont de pierre construit sur la rivière d'Allier à Moulins , published in 1771 .
In 1940 an arch was blown to stop the advance of the German troops. The arch was restored in 1942 as a reinforced concrete arch. During the Vichy regime it was an important point on the demarcation line between the German-occupied part of France and the "free zone" .
The Pont de Régemortes has been protected as a Monument historique since July 17, 1946 .
Web links
- Règemortes Bridge (1763). In: Structurae
- Pont Régemortes on Base Mérimée , accessed March 9, 2012
- Gaspard de Prony: RÉGEMORTES in Biographie universelle, ancienne et moderne by Joseph Fr. Michaud, Louis Gabriel Michaud, Volume 37, page 226 ff. LG Michaud, Libraire-Éditeur, Paris, 1824.
- Louis de Régemorte. In: F.-P.-H. Tarbé de St-Hardouin: Notices biographiques sur les Ingénieurs des Ponts et Chaussées depuis la création du Corps, en 1716, jusqu'à nos jours. Baudry et Cie., Paris 1884; P. 23 (30) ( digitized on archive)