Great Seto Bridge

About

The Great Seto Bridge or Seto Ohashi Bridge (Seto Ōhashi) is a series of double deck bridges connecting Okayama and Kagawa prefectures in Japan across a series of five small islands in the Seto Inland Sea. Built over the period 1978–1988, it is one of the three routes of the Honshū–Shikoku Bridge Project connecting Honshū and Shikoku islands and the only one to carry rail traffic. The total length is 13.1 kilometers (8.1 mi), and the longest span, the Minami Bisan-Seto Bridge, is 1.1 kilometers (3, 600 ft). The crossing takes about 20 minutes by car or train. The ferry crossing before the bridge was built took about an hour. The bridges carry two lanes of highway traffic in each direction (Seto-Chūō Expressway) on the upper deck and one railway track in each direction (Seto-Ōhashi Line) on the lower deck. The lower deck was designed to accommodate an additional set of Shinkansen tracks for the proposed Shikoku Shinkansen line.

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