Göltzsch Viaduct
Göltzschtalbrücke
Interesting facts
- An 1845 design competition drew 81 entries, but none could prove it would carry trains and none was built; one even proposed a prison inside the bridge.
- Johann Andreas Schubert, who chaired the competition jury, then designed the bridge himself using the new thrust-line theory, making it one of the first bridges anywhere planned by structural calculation.
- When the valley floor proved softer than expected, chief engineer Robert Wilke replaced the planned row of equal arches in the middle with a single large central arch.
- Nearly 20 brickworks along the railway fired about 50,000 bricks a day for the project, rising to 150,000 on peak days.
- Its mortar was a special recipe from a Reichenbach pharmacist, Heinrich Carl, mixing lime, sand, brick dust, alum-shale slag and water.
- The scaffolding, built individually for each arch, consumed about 23,000 tree trunks, though some accounts give a figure ten times higher.
- Schubert fell from favour after the 1849 Dresden May Uprising, was removed from the project and was not invited to the 1851 opening; he was rehabilitated only in 1859.
- King Frederick Augustus II struck the ceremonial hammer blows on the keystone of the great upper arch on 14 September 1850.
- Completed together with the nearby Elster Viaduct, it closed the last gap in the railway line linking Berlin and Munich.
- In the final days of the Second World War the Wehrmacht planned to blow up the viaduct, but the demolition never took place.
Why it is worth it
The Göltzsch Viaduct is a bridge built almost entirely out of small clay bricks — 26,021,000 of them, laid by hand between 1846 and 1851 — because the valley it crosses happened to sit on abundant loam deposits, and hauling in cut stone would have been slower and far more expensive than firing bricks on-site. That local-materials logic produced something that briefly held the record for the tallest railway bridge on Earth, and still holds the record, unchallenged, for the largest brick-built bridge in the world: 574 metres long, 78 metres high, narrowing from 23 metres wide at its base to just 9 metres at the top, carried across four stacked tiers of 98 arched vaults. Granite was reserved only for the structural points under the greatest stress; everything else the eye actually sees is brick.
The human cost behind the record is less often mentioned than the record itself: 1,736 workers were employed on the construction over its five years, and 31 of them died on site, working with the scaffolding and hoisting equipment of the 1840s at heights that modern safety standards wouldn't tolerate for a moment. Engineer Johann Andreas Schubert designed it as part of the new Leipzig–Dresden railway network, at a moment when railway engineering itself was barely a generation old and every large viaduct was still, in some sense, an experiment.
What's genuinely remarkable is that the experiment worked permanently. Nearly 175 years after it opened, the viaduct is still in daily commercial use — up to fifty freight and passenger trains a day, some weighing as much as 2,000 tonnes, cross a structure of stacked nineteenth-century brick that has needed nothing more than routine maintenance to keep doing the job it was built for.
Getting there
4 km from Reichenbach/Vogtland. Karlovy Vary Airport (KLV) is about 67 km away.
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From the encyclopaedia
The Göltzsch Viaduct is a railway bridge in Germany. It is the largest brick-built bridge in the world, and for a time it was the tallest railway bridge in the world. It spans the valley of the Göltzsch River between the Reichenbach im Vogtland district of Mylau and the adjacent town of Netzschkau in the German Free State of Saxony.
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