Magdeburg Canal Bridge
Kanalbrücke Magdeburg
Interesting facts
- At 918 metres, it is the longest canal bridge in Europe, with about 690 metres crossing the floodplain and 228 metres spanning the river itself.
- Construction first began in 1934 on a design of steel trusses and twenty concrete arches; by 1942 the abutments, pier foundations and four arches were finished.
- The 1930s remains were blasted away, and their 53,000 cubic metres of rubble were reused as a base for the new construction site.
- The river span was welded together on an 85-metre track at the eastern bank and pushed across the Elbe in stages, helped by a floating pontoon.
- In winter, air is pumped into the water along the trough walls, and the rising bubbles stop ice from forming and pushing the sides apart.
- The main river span is 106 metres long, leaving a navigation channel at least 90 metres wide for ships on the Elbe below.
- Engineers kept the trough to a single-lane 34 metres because the nearby Hohenwarthe lock works on a 30-minute cycle, so ships rarely need to pass.
- The bridge itself cost roughly €130 million; the full Magdeburg waterway junction around it, with its locks, cost more than €500 million.
- It opened to traffic on 10 October 2003, linking Berlin's inland harbours directly with the ports of the Rhine.
- Each bearing over the river piers is 2.18 metres in diameter and rated for a vertical load of 135 meganewtons.
Why it is worth it
The idea of joining the Mittellandkanal and the Elbe-Havel Canal directly over the Elbe River goes back to 1919, and by 1938 the anchor points and the Rothensee boat lift next to it were already built — then the Second World War stopped everything, and the divided, communist East German government afterward had no reason to finish a project designed to speed trade with the West. It sat half-built for roughly sixty years, a Cold War casualty nobody had the money or the incentive to complete.
Reunification changed the calculation. Work restarted in earnest in 1997 and took six years and around €500 million to finish: a 918-metre steel-and-concrete trough, 34 metres wide, built from 24,000 tonnes of steel and 68,000 cubic metres of concrete, resting on twenty pillars, four of them standing in the Elbe itself. The bridge exists to erase a very specific, very costly detour — without it, barges had to descend from the canal into the Elbe, sail 12 kilometres downstream, then climb back up into the Elbe-Havel Canal, a crossing that low river water levels often made impossible without partially unloading cargo first.
What makes it worth standing on the bank for is the plain strangeness of the sight: loaded cargo ships gliding through a channel of water suspended above a river, seemingly ignoring it, on a structure engineered purely so the river underneath becomes irrelevant to them. It's the same basic trick Telford pulled off in cast iron two centuries earlier in Wales, scaled up with modern concrete and steel to carry vessels far larger than any narrowboat.
Getting there
10 km from Neue Neustadt. Leipzig/Halle Airport (LEJ) is about 97 km away.
On these lists
From the encyclopaedia
The Magdeburg Water Bridge is a large navigable aqueduct in central Germany, located near Magdeburg. The largest canal underbridge in Europe, it spans the river Elbe and directly connects the Mittellandkanal on the west side and Elbe-Havel Canal on the east side of the river, allowing large commercial ships to pass between the Rhineland and Berlin without having to descend into and then climb out of the Elbe itself.
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