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Traffic flow in the Lower Rhine area is set to improve with the construction of the new bridge over the Rhine as part of the B 58n bypass around the city of Wesel, Germany. The bypass is some 9.9 km long and budgets at around EUR 150 million, and is a three-phase project: the 4.55 km bypass around the town of Büderich, the 1.6 km bridge over the Rhine, and the 3.75 km southern bypass around Wesel itself. The "Rheinbrücke Wesel" consortium of Hermann Kirchner Hoch- und Ingenieurbau GmbH, Bad Hersfeld, and Donges Stahlbau GmbH, Darmstadt, is using Doka formwork to construct the keystone section of the B 58n highway: the new Rhine bridge at Wesel.
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Traffic flow in the Lower Rhine area is set to improve with the construction of the new bridge over the Rhine at Wesel, Germany, where Doka automatic climbing formwork SKE 50 is hard at work.
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The bridge now in place over the Rhine is actually a makeshift structure that dates back to 1953, when it was erected as a stopgap measure on the foundations of the bridge destroyed in the war. Hopelessly insufficient for today's volume of traffic it is heavily congested, structurally inadequate and inevitably a severe bottleneck. The incessant need for repairs, moreover, leads to disproportionately high financial outlay. One of the main traffic arteries of the Lower Rhine region, the B 58 has long relied on this "permanent makeshift bridge" situated at kilometre 814 of the navigable Rhine to interconnect the parts of the Wesel district on either side of the river. It takes only a very slight disruption in traffic flow to create major tailbacks that can snarl up traffic in Wesel's city streets. The new bridge will significantly alleviate the situation.
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| The new bridge's total length of 773 m is made up of three sections: the prestressed-concrete foreland bridge on the left bank of the Rhine, 376 metres long; the cable-stayed clear-span river bridge, 335 metres long, of which the steel structure accounts for 315 metres, and the all-steel right-bank foreland bridge, 62 metres long. The Rhine itself is a major navigable waterway, and since a clear span of at least 300 metres was essential to facilitate river traffic the designers opted for a suspension bridge. At a cost of EUR 50 million, this bridge accounts for the lion's share of total spend on the bypass. |
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| The landmark feature of the new Rhine bridge is the single 130-metre suspension tower, an inverted "Y" on the left bank of the river, clearly visible even from far across the Lower Rhine region. The design brief called for a high-strength concrete structure with high surface quality. Deutsche Doka's office in Hanover, Germany, was awarded the formwork contract for the hollow-core tower feet and supplied the automatic climbing formwork. The complex planning and structural-strength calculations were entrusted to Doka's Application Technology centre in Maisach, Bavaria. |
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Contractor: Construction work by: Consortium of Hermann Kirchner Hoch- und Ingenieurbau GmbH, Bad Hersfeld, and Donges Stahlbau GmbH, Darmstadt
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