Running across it are 6 lanes of traffic requiring a roadway width of 75 feet 23 mtrs. Equally impressive are the massive concrete piers that drop almost to the floor of the valley. Pier number 2 measures feet meters high from the foundation to the underside of the box beam or feet meters from the lower side of the pier foundation and was the tallest in the world at the time.
Prior to Pit River, the tallest concrete piers were on Switzerland's Sitter Viaduct at 99 meters if measured to the top of the structure and France's Fades Viaduct at 92 meters. The tallest steel bridge tower was the Before Gokteik the tallest steel bridge pier was the central tower of the Kinzua Viaduct at 87 meters.
Before Kinzua the Grandfrey Viaduct of Switzerland held the record with steel and stone piers In the Crumlin Viaduct was the tallest with purely steel piers 64 meters tall while the Sitter Viaduct had stone and iron piers of approximately 56 meters in height.
The Portage Viaduct had masonry and timber piers of 67 meters. Prior to Portage there were few true "piers" of great height, only stone aqueducts such as the Pont Roquefavour in France and the Ponte Delle Torri in Spoleto, Italy with structural heights of 82 meters. Shortly after Bulgaria and Romania joined the European Union, the foundation stone was laid and in , the New Europe Bridge was officially inaugurated with a celebration whose guests included prominent officials from Brussels.
Today, one cannot detect any signs of the long-desired economic upturn in the region. Irena Vasileva lives in the Bulgarian city of Vidin and has walked across the almost two-kilometer-long 1. But that didn't happen," says Vasileva, who works as a journalist.
According to the bridge's operator "Danube Bridge Vidin - Calafat AD," the bridge created 64 new jobs on the Bulgarian side and 33 on the Romanian side. New businesses, hotels and cafes were not built, let alone the much-hoped-for new industrial zone, says Vasileva. Bodo Hombach, the former special coordinator of the Stability Pact for South Eastern Europe, remembers what he himself stresses were the bumpy beginnings of the project.
He simply did not understand why a kilometer-long river only had one single bridge over it, the Friendship Bridge, built in the s near Giurgu-Ruse. In an interview with DW, Hombach said that Bulgaria's presidential administration initially claimed that it did not know and did not want to get to know its neighbors to the north of the Danube.
No one really wants to comment on the "games. She did not state a particular reason for the cancelation, nor did she reschedule the interview. Romanian and Bulgarian journalists have written dozens of pieces about the new bridge over the Danube. They have covered the three-year delay of construction, the countless building defects and the constant repairs that have impacted traffic.
The lowest bidder for the contract, the Spanish company FCC, was hired to construct the bridge for million euros and in the end, demanded 50 percent more due to "unforeseeable conditions. The new bridge has a four-lane highway, train tracks, bike paths and pedestrian lanes. Evgeniya Naidenova, of operator "Danube Bridge Vidin - Calafat AD," says expectations were surpassed in the bridge's first year of operation.
In the past year, there were even , crossings. Yet an enormous flow of truck and car traffic that would earn a great deal of money cannot be accommodated because access roads do not have the necessary capacity. The expansion of the access roads has been promised many times and even the construction of more bridges has been negotiated, but nothing has happened. Many truck drivers are unhappy about the route - they would have preferred a bridge further to the east that would take them closer to Bucharest and Sofia.
Many drivers say that the roads on both sides of the bridge are too narrow, and have also been deteriorating, which leads to traffic jams - like the recent six-kilometer-long traffic bottleneck in front of the bridge.
On the Romanian side is Calafat, a small, sleepy Danube port that flourished in the 19th century. Now, all that is left of its prosperous past can be seen behind the crumbling facades of its many buildings. This was once an important hub for wheat from southern Romania, the country's breadbasket. Then, the communist dictatorship imposed industrialization on the city. After the fall of the iron curtain, it was over. Now Calafat is like a ghost town.
Before the bridge was built, the ferry service was one of the few sources of income for the inhabitants. Turkish truck drivers who were waiting to cross were the best customers for cigarettes, coffee and mineral water.
But that is all over now. When the trucks started roaring through the bumpy roads to the bridge, the black market ceased to exist. One bridge cannot change the situation, say the inhabitants with irony.
Hardly anyone is interested in what the other side looks like. All they know about it is from hearsay. There is no bus service over the bridge and the passenger train that crosses the bridge once a day does not stop in Calafat, but instead, in a village that is almost 10 kilometers away. It is no wonder that a border official looked at DW's reporter with amazement when he told the official that he would walk to Vidin to see the Bulgarian side.
It was originally made of wood, but the Romans later replaced it with stone and basalt from the nearby Eifel Mountains. The stone pillars that remain today date back to the 2nd century AD. The upper half was renovated in the 12th century and again in the 18th century after bombing by French troops.
Built in during the Cold War, The Fehmarn Sound Bridge was embedded with explosive vaults due of concerns about a potential invasion. The bridge spans across a section of the Baltic Sea, linking the island of Fehmarn with the north-eastern tip of the German mainland. The six vaults beneath the road on the mainland side were connected to a nearby control point.
Today the colorful bridge over the Gera River is lined on both sides with galleries and artisan shops. Some early wooden bridges had roofs to protect the main structure from the elements. It was built in but suffered damage from floods during the Middle Ages. This current version was completed in At almost meters feet it is the longest roofed wooden bridge in Europe.
The expansion of railway lines across Germany in the s posed new engineering challenges. It was the tallest railway bridge in the world at the time it opened in and remains the largest brick-built bridge in the world.
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