Cathedral Bridge

About

The Cathedral Bridge (Dombrücke, pronounced [ˈdoːmˌbʁʏkə]) was a railway and street bridge crossing the river Rhine in the German city of Cologne. It was owned by the Cologne-Minden Railway Company and named after the Cologne Cathedral, which is located on the same longitudinal axis. It was built in combination with the original Central Station (Zentralbahnhof [tsɛnˈtʁaːlˌbaːnhoːf]) and a new ground-level railway track through the northern Old Town of the Cologne Innenstadt. As the Cathedral Bridge could not support the increased traffic of the new Köln Hauptbahnhof in 1894, it was replaced by the Hohenzollern Bridge in 1911. The Cathedral Bridge was the second railway bridge to be built over the river Rhine, after the significantly shorter Waldshut–Koblenz Rhine Bridge with spans of up to 52 metres (171 ft), which was opened just a few months prior on 18 August 1859. The Prussian authorities pressed for a bridge due to increasing road traffic between Cologne and the eastern river bank. Before the Cathedral Bridge, passengers and goods had to be transported across the river by reaction ferry or pontoon bridge. The city council filed a request with Frederick William IV of Prussia in 1847, who through the Ministry of Trade, Commerce and Public Works appointed the Prussian chief civil engineer Karl Lentze to design the bridge. The initial drawings of the bridge allowed only one horse-drawn carriage to cross the bridge. On the western bank, the road was led in northeastern direction past the Cologne Cathedral. The deck load was to be kept low, because at that time it was not possible to build heavy load bridges spanning over 100 metres (330 ft); the first bridge that was subjected to a full structural analysis was the Göltzsch Viaduct only 9 years prior, which is a brick arch bridge with its widest arch spanning 30.9 metres (101 ft) and having a width of 9 metres (30 ft) at the top. Conversely, the Cathedral Bridge was a lattice truss bridge with spans up to 103.2 metres (339 ft) and a collective width of 16.73 metres (54.9 ft). It might, however, be mentioned that the Britannia Bridge successfully took increasingly heavy railway trains across the M

Adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA). Photography via Wikimedia Commons.