Rethe Bascule Bridge in Hamburg
Facts and Figures:
Place/Country: Hamburg/Germany
Completion: 2015
Project type: Movable Bridge, Bascule Bridge
Client: Hamburg Port Authority (HPA)
Description:
The construction of the Rethe bascule bridges (one for road, the other for railway traffic) in the port of Hamburg is still a project of superlatives. It is one of the biggest of its type in the world. It consists of two bridge wings for road traffic and two bridge wings for rail traffic. The Rethe Bridges enables land traffic to cross the Rethe, which is a waterway in the port area of Hamburg.
As a Bascule Bridge, it serves Hamburg Harbour’s shipping traffic. And the volume of this traffic is significant: Hamburg Harbour is, after Rotterdam and Antwerp, the third largest sea port in Europe. To serve the large number of passing vessels, irrespective of those vessels’ size, the newly-built bascule bridges not only need to open very often, but also extremely quickly and reliably. This guarantees that traffic restrictions in both directions are kept to as little as possible.
Expressed statistically:
Between the two pivot bearings, the bridge’s span is 104m.
The width of the street bridge is 14m and the rail bridge’s width is 10.4m.
The bridge is constructed to open and close about 3,000 times a year.
Opening/closing of the bridge takes approx. 5 minutes, depending on the synchronisation mechanism which compensates for the wind and other weather irregularities.
The scope of Waagner-Biro‘s contribution to this project included its design, the manufacture and installation of the mechanical engineering, the hydraulic drive systems and the machine control systems. It was these that presented the project with a complex challenge because they demand the meeting of very high standards of quality, security and redundancy.
