Solkan Bridge

A single span of cut limestone, 85 metres across, leaps the emerald-green Soča just above Solkan, and it remains the longest stone arch ever built to carry a railway. The Solkan Bridge is the masterpiece of the Bohinj Railway, the Austro-Hungarian line driven through the Julian Alps at the beginning of the twentieth century to link Central Europe with the port of Trieste, and it marks the end of an age: soon after it was finished, reinforced concrete took over the long spans that had once belonged to masonry.

The bridge was designed by the architect Rudolf Jaussner and the engineer Leopold Oerley. Their first plan called for an arch of 80 metres, but the poor ground on the banks forced them in the spring of 1904 to widen it to 85. The great arch was built in 1904–1905 by the Viennese firm Brüder Redlich und Berger, while the approach viaducts were the work of a Gorizia company formed for the project by the Turin engineer Giovanni Battista Sard. The ring was assembled from 4,533 blocks of shelly limestone quarried at Aurisina near Trieste, each cut and numbered on a work site on the left bank and laid in a fixed order; setting the stone of the main arch took only eighteen days. Altogether the viaduct is almost 220 metres long and stands about 36 metres above the river. Archduke Franz Ferdinand opened the line on 19 July 1906.

The bridge's history is bound up with the Isonzo Front of the First World War, fought along the Soča. In August 1916, during the battles for Gorizia, retreating Austro-Hungarian troops blew up the main arch with 930 kg of explosive, and a temporary steel span carried the trains from 1918. Italian State Railways rebuilt the arch in stone between 1925 and 1927, almost exactly as before, though with four small side arches instead of the original five. In the Second World War it escaped largely unharmed. Solkan is now a suburb of Nova Gorica, the town built after 1947 on the Yugoslav side of the new border, facing the old Italian city of Gorizia, and the bridge has been a protected technical monument since 1985.

Getting there

The bridge spans the Soča at Solkan, on the northern edge of Nova Gorica; the Italian city of Gorizia is about 5 km away across the border. Trains on the Bohinj Railway still cross it, and Nova Gorica station on the same line lies close by. The nearest airport is Trieste (TRS), about 22 km away in Italy; Ljubljana Jože Pučnik Airport (LJU) in Slovenia is about 68 km away.