Valley crossing

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Kochertal bridge near Schwäbisch Hall
Steyr breakthrough valley crossing

In traffic route construction, a valley crossing is a railway or motorway bridge that crosses a deeply cut valley almost horizontally.

Bridge construction is cost-intensive and requires high pillars with mostly complex foundations, but saves the long detours of the route. Construction is usually a pre-stressed concrete bridge in the so-called cantilever from both sides (projecting cars from 5-10 meters). In the case of motorways, a separate bridge is built on the same pillars for each directional lane in order to enable repairs or subsequent construction of the structure without a complete traffic block.

However, the world's tallest bridges are suspension bridges with long suspension cables. In the central Chinese province of Hubei , the Siduhe Bridge spans a narrow gorge at a height of 472 m, followed by the Baluarte Bridge (390 m) in Mexico.

Highest bridges in Europe

The highest valley crossing in Europe is the Millau Viaduct (270 m) in the French Massif Central, which at 2460 m is the longest cable-stayed bridge in the world. Most motorway valley crossings are built as girder bridges in a box girder system, of which Europe has 14 with relative heights over 150 m, 8 of them in Italy. The highest bridge in Germany is the Kochertal Bridge (178 m) near Geislingen am Kocher, completed in 1976, with a total length of 1128 meters. The oldest - and one of the most famous - is the Europabrücke (190 m) over the Sill Gorge near Innsbruck , which was built for the 1964 Winter Olympics . More recent are u. a. the Moselle valley bridge (155 m) on the A 61 near Koblenz, the Lavant valley crossing (160 m) in the Carinthian section of the Südautobahn or the Schottwien valley crossing at Semmering (Lower Austria) at 130 meters.

The Viadotto Sfalassà in Calabria has a rare construction , which reaches its 254 m height through a 376 m wide truss construction with two 70 m long struts protruding over the gorge . Among the arch bridges is above all the Pont de Gueuroz, built in 1933 over the Trient Gorge in Valais, which at 187 m was the highest road bridge in Europe until 1964.

Vienna Wall Aqueduct

Aqueducts

In addition to traffic bridges, high aqueducts are also known as valley crossings. A well-known example is the Mauer aqueduct , a listed building of the first Viennese spring water pipeline in Vienna XXIII Liesing . It is curved with a height of 23 m and a length of 533 m. A similar structure crosses the valley of the Mödlingbach 10 km further south and guarantees an even gradient of the water pipe of a few centimeters per kilometer.

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