Vistula bridge Dirschau

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Coordinates: 54 ° 5 ′ 34 "  N , 18 ° 48 ′ 23"  E

Vistula bridge Dirschau
Vistula bridge Dirschau
Convicted Prussian Eastern Railway
Subjugated Vistula
place Dirschau (today: Tczew)
construction Lattice girders , lens girders , trusses
overall length 837.3 m, later 1074 m
Number of openings 6 (+ 3)
Longest span 130.88 m
Clear width 121.13 m
start of building 1851/1888
completion 1857/1891/1958
planner 1851: Carl Lentze
1888: JW Schwedler
1958: Konrad Liśkiewicz
location
Vistula Bridge Dirschau (Pomerania)
Vistula bridge Dirschau

The Dirschau bridge over the Vistula River was built between 1851 and 1857 at Dirschau (now Tczew ) as part of the construction of the Berlin - Königsberg line of the Prussian Eastern Railway . The construction work also included the Nogat Bridge near Marienburg (today Malbork ). The engineer Johann Carl Wilhelm Lentze (1801–1883) was in charge of planning the bridges. They are considered to be the first long-span girder bridges on the European continent.

From 1888 to 1891 a second bridge was built right next to the first at both locations.

The Vistula bridges in Dirschau, which belonged to Poland after the First World War due to the creation of the Polish corridor , were the scene of the actual beginning of the Second World War through the attack by German soldiers.

After the destruction in World War II, Poland first built a temporary, and in 1958 a permanent bridge.

Dirschau / Tczew is an important railway junction to this day, with direct connections to Gdansk, Warsaw , via Warsaw to Krakow , via Bydgoszcz (Bromberg) to Poznan and to Piła .

First Dirschau bridge across the Vistula

prehistory

A railway bridge over the Vistula was long considered impossible. A wooden bridge built by the Knights of the Order near Marienburg in the 14th century was destroyed by floods in the early 18th century. A wooden bridge built near Thorn (Toruń) in the 16th century could only be preserved with great difficulty due to frequent floods and the annual ice drift. In the middle of the 19th century, large expanses were spanned with suspension bridges, but they were all road bridges.

When the Prussian building authorities convened a commission for the construction of the Vistula and Nogat bridges and the necessary electricity and dike regulations in 1844, Robert Stephenson's Conwy Railway Bridge and the Britannia Bridge in Wales were still in the planning phase. Lentze, who was commissioned with an initial draft for the bridges, therefore initially planned a chain bridge with five openings.

As a result of the crisis of 1846/1847 , King Friedrich Wilhelm IV stopped all preparatory work on the bridges on June 6, 1847, only the construction of the river and dyke could be continued. At the instigation of the Minister of Commerce, Lentze used the break to see the construction of the Britannia Bridge on site. He then dropped the idea of ​​a suspension bridge in favor of a solid bridge. But he thought a full-walled box girder bridge was too expensive, and you couldn't swim into a box on the shallow Vistula. Therefore, he decided at the resumption of work on a on a falsework to be assembled girder bridge .

The Vistula Bridge near Dirschau from 1857

Lattice girder bridge (1857)

With the law of December 7, 1849, the construction of the bridges over the Vistula and Nogat and the electricity and dike regulations due to the railway system were ordered and the necessary funds were granted. On April 3, 1850, work was resumed.

The basis of the construction were the theoretical investigations carried out shortly before by Karl Culmann and Johann Wilhelm Schwedler . The structural calculations and the implementation plans were made by the Swiss engineer Rudolf Eduard Schinz . The wrought iron superstructure of the bridge was made by the Dirschauer Maschinenbauanstalt, an offshoot of the Maschinenbauanstalt HW Krüger from Potsdam. The pillar towers and the portals of the abutments were designed by the architect Friedrich August Stüler .

Lentze's design now envisaged a total of 837.35 m (2668 feet ) long lattice girder bridge with six openings each with 130.88 m span and a clear width of 121.15 m. At the request of the military she was at both ends of high proscenium towers and a Vorwerk edged who had gathered 30.91 m long. The lattice girder bridge was flanked by two round towers above the five river pillars . The architect Stüler designed it in the style of a medieval castle crowned with battlements .

Look into the lattice girder

The bridge had a track and a carriage way on both sides . The paths were not separated from the tracks, as horses would shy away from the locomotives and therefore the few wagons had to wait for the trains to pass. Outside the lattice girders, there was a footpath that led around the outside of the pillar towers. Pedestrians could therefore use the long bridge regardless of the passage of a train.

The bridge had a headroom of 3.77 m (12 feet) above the highest water level and 8.16 m (26 feet) above the highest navigable water level. Up and down the river there were cranes to raise and lower the masts .

The lattice girders were 11.83 m (37 2/3 feet) high and 6.28 m (20 feet) apart. The strength of its close-knit network of diagonal bars and vertical iron angles was determined by Schinz according to the structural requirements. His idea of ​​combining the superstructure of two openings into one continuous beam led to significant savings. Lattice-like cross girders on which the track lay and two upper wind braces connected the lattice girders.

The pillars had a pile foundation, set against a pothole was surrounded by a fence wall and protected by a wall of stone blocks. The pillars consisted of brickwork on the inside and natural stone on the outside against the ice drift.

The first train passed the bridge on October 12, 1857, and the Dirschau – Marienberg route was opened to traffic. The formal handover of the two bridges to the Royal Railway Direction Bromberg took place after completion of all remaining work on December 8th, 1858. On August 24th of the following year the Royal Commission for the construction of the bridges was dissolved.

Lens carrier bridge (1891)

The Vistula Bridge near Dirschau from 1891

Towards the end of the 1860s, the second track was laid on the Eastern Railway, but the bridges remained single-track, which was found to be a nuisance with increasing traffic. Carts had to wait longer and longer, on the other hand, a broken axle of a cart led to a prolonged blocking of rail traffic. Therefore it was decided to build new, double-track bridges and to convert the old ones to road bridges. The German Reich made a grant of 60% of the calculated costs.

Both bridges were designed by Johann Wilhelm Schwedler . The architect of the portals was Johann Eduard Jacobsthal . A central construction office was set up in Bromberg under the direction of Georg Christoph Mehrtens , in which the implementation planning was also drawn up. The iron construction was supplied and installed by the stock corporation for iron industry and bridge construction, formerly Johann Caspar Harkort in Duisburg .

Construction began in the spring of 1888. The new bridge was 40 m downstream from the lattice girder bridge. Like this one, it had six openings with spans of 130.88 m.

Old u. new Vistula bridge

The superstructure consisted of lens girders with diagonal struts crossing in the middle between the upper and lower chords and a central chord as a tie . The girders had a lateral center distance of 9.5 m from each other. The track was attached to the lower chords with vertical stretcher bars. The superstructure was made almost entirely of wrought iron ( welding iron ). Steel ( fluoro iron ) was already available in sufficient quantity and quality, but the extensive material tests of around 7000 t could not have been carried out in the time available. That is why steel ( Siemens-Martin-Stahl ) was only used for individual, heavily stressed parts such as the drawstrings and the support bars of the roadway.

The pillars were only 6 m wide (compared to the 9.73 m wide pillars of the old bridge). An explosive mine system was set up in one of the pillars. The eastern portal was designed so that it could serve as a central pillar without major changes if the bridge were to be extended. At that time it was discussed for a long time whether the Nogat, which diverted a large part of the water from the Vistula, should be completely or partially closed so that the silting arm of the Vistula would receive more water.

The Dirschauer Bridge was opened to traffic on October 28, 1891.

Tczew, Most Lisewski - fotopolska.eu (309232) .jpg

Extensions (1912)

In order to widen the flow cross-section during floods, the two bridges were lengthened with parallel- chorded lattice girders by three spans with 81.6 m span each, making the bridges 1074 m long.

War damage, new buildings

When German soldiers attacked the Vistula Bridge at the beginning of World War II on September 1, 1939, the Poles tried to prevent the invasion and blew up both bridges. The Germans built a single-track emergency bridge on it. The following year they built a new double-track bridge and a temporary pedestrian crossing in the course of the old bridge. On the retreat from the Red Army at the end of the war, the railway bridge was almost completely destroyed by a German demolition squad on March 1945.

After the Second World War, the reconstruction by the Poles began, using partly English ESTB temporary bridges, partly dismantled superstructures and partly new buildings. On December 23, 1947, the train service was resumed. From December 1958, double-track railway operation was possible again, and from 1959 the road bridge was also continuously passable again after the last ESTB elements had been dismantled from the railway bridge and floated into the road bridge. In 1971 new constructions were installed in two sections of the railway bridge. In 1983, electric train operations began.

Today the original lattice girders are only found in three fields of the old bridge. It is one of the oldest large iron box bridges and, together with the remaining four pillar towers, forms a technical monument. In the post-war period, a new bridge for road traffic was built around 4.5 kilometers to the south. The old bridge was still used as a road and pedestrian bridge. It was passable for cars up to 2.50 m high and 3.5 t total weight and has been closed to vehicles and pedestrians since 2011.

The old bridge was included in the list of historical milestones in civil engineering by the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) in 2004 .

In 2012 it was decided to reconstruct the missing parts of the girder bridge and the pier towers of the bridge from 1857. The reconstruction was not yet fully completed in summer 2016.

  • Bridges blown up in 1939 (on the left you can see the lens shape of the girders with the central belt)

  • Rest of the old lattice girders

  • New and old bridge from the west bank

  • New bridge

  • Part of the new bridge with a train

literature

Web links

Commons : Weichselbrücke Dirschau (1857)  - Collection of images, videos and audio files
Commons : Weichselbrücke Dirschau (1891)  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Remarks

  1. ^ The Asnières railway bridge near Paris, built from 1848 to 1852, had box girders with 5 openings of 31.4 m each.
  2. ↑ A little later, the Vistula Bridge near Fordon (1893) was built entirely of steel after extensive material tests.

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Obituary , Centralblatt der Bauverwaltung , June 30, 1883, pp. 233 and 234, accessed on December 19, 2012
  2. ↑ First Dirschauer Weichselbrücke on Ostbahn.eu
  3. ↑ Mehrtens: On the construction history of the old railway bridges at Dirschau and Marienburg. Column 99
  4. ↑ Mehrtens, column 101
  5. ↑ Mehrtens, column 102
  6. ↑ Mehrtens, column 105
  7. ^ Friedrich Heinzerling: The bridges in iron . With: The bridge over the Vistula in Dirschau . Otto Spamer, Leipzig 1870, p. 273 ( full text in Google Book Search).
  8. ↑ Mehrtens, column 117
  9. ↑ Mehrtens, column 118
  10. ↑ Mehrtens, column 106
  11. ↑ 1 Prussian foot = 0.31385 m
  12. ^ Karl-Eugen Kurrer: History of structural analysis: In search of balance . 2nd Edition. Ernst & Sohn, Berlin 2016, ISBN 978-3-433-60750-3 , p. 75 .
  13. ^ Karl-Eugen Kurrer: The History of the Theory of Structures: From Arch Analysis to Computational Mechanics . Ernst & Sohn, Berlin 2008, ISBN 978-3-433-01838-5 , pp. 80 ( limited preview in Google Book search).
  14. ↑ Mehrtens, column 113
  15. ↑ Mehrtens, column 116
  16. ^ The construction of the new railway bridges over the Vistula near Dirschau and over the Nogat near Marienburg . Column 236
  17. ^ The construction of the new railway bridges over the Vistula near Dirschau and over the Nogat near Marienburg . Column 425
  18. ^ The construction of the new railway bridges over the Vistula near Dirschau and over the Nogat near Marienburg . Column 246
  19. ^ The construction of the new railway bridges over the Vistula near Dirschau and over the Nogat near Marienburg . Column 250
  20. ^ The construction of the new railway bridges over the Vistula near Dirschau and over the Nogat near Marienburg . Column 238
  21. ↑ The Vistula Bridges between 1920 and 1945 on ostbahn.eu
  22. ↑ Everall Sectional Truss Railway Bridge , developed by the English Lieutenant Colonel Everall for the Mulberry ports emergency bridge (Colin Flint: Geopolitical Constructs: The Mulberry Harbors, World War Two, and the Making of a Militarized Transatlantic . Rowman & Littlefield, Lanham MD / London 2016, ISBN 978-1-4422-6668-1 , pp. 69 ( limited preview in Google Book search). )
  23. ↑ Bridges over the Wisla (Vistula) after 1945 on ostbahn.eu
  24. ↑ Old Wisla Bridge on asce.org
  25. ^ Letter from Henryk Demps (PDF) ostbahn.eu