Hamm Railway Bridge

The Hamm Railway Bridge carries the Mönchengladbach–Düsseldorf railway over the Rhine between the Düsseldorf suburb of Hamm and the Neuss district of Rheinparkcenter in the German state of North Rhine-Westphalia.The original Hamm Railway Bridge was a double-track bridge built by the Bergisch-Märkische Railway Company from April 1868 as the first solid bridge across the Rhine in Düsseldorf and was opened on 24 July 1870. It was named the König-Wilhelm-Brücke or König-Wilhelm-Eisenbahn-Rheinbrücke after the Prussian King William I. It was built as a wrought iron arch supporting a three-span truss to plans of the engineer Pichier of the Harkort Company of Duisburg. The bridge towers on both sides reflected not only a need for architectural decoration, but also a desire to promote the military security of the bridge in the event of a war. For the same reason there was an outer fort at the side of the bridge, which was removed in 1885. Between July and September 1896, the approaches to the bridge were repaired and the track body was renewed under traffic. The whole construction was carried out in heavy traffic with all traffic handled on a single track. After 1896 the greatly increasing train traffic necessitated the building of additional infrastructure to complement the bridge. Between 1909 and 1911, a second, parallel, double-track bridge was built only 32 m upstream. It was built with the same distance between the piers, with a more modern and stronger superstructure as an iron truss arch. As with the older bridge there were bridge towers, but they were larger and stronger.