Bridges and Viaducts in Germany — 37 Listed by Length

• 37entries listed
• 4.36 kmlongest bore
• 1961–2004openings span
• 54.27 kmtotal length

The record table

How this archive measures: lengths, bores, dates and ordering

How this table is compiled

The three longest entries alone account for 10.88 km of the 54.27 km on this page, which is 20 per cent of the total from 3 of 36 rows. The shorter half of the table totals 19.61 km against 34.66 km for the longer half, from the same number of rows.

Where one of these 36 lengths disagrees with an operator's own figure for Germany, the table keeps the published value and notes the difference instead of averaging the two. The 36 rows for Germany are ordered by length, not by date, so the 2004 opening sits well down the table without being any less current.

This page records the bridges and viaducts catalogued for Germany in a tunnel almanac maintained at this address since the late 1990s. Laid end to end the entries on this page would run 54.27 km, which is a number with no engineering meaning but a useful sense of the scale of what is catalogued.

Dated entries run from 1961 to 2004, and the busiest decade is the 1970s with 9 recorded openings. The table on this page runs to 37 rows and records Viaduct, Length (m), Date of opening, Land and Kreis for each of them, which is the shape the original compiler chose rather than one imposed here.

A new scheme in Germany would have to beat 4.36 km to change the head of this table, and that is the figure worth rechecking when one opens. The longest entry is 4.4 times the shortest and 3.7 times the median, which is the quickest measure of how uneven the table is.

Reading the figures

Roughly 5 of the dated entries opened in this century, which is a rough measure of how much of the network is recent. The captions name 11 distinct places and structures — Neckar, Hamburg and Height among them — and those names are the index into the length tables where each is recorded with its own figure.

Openings average one every 1.4 years across the dated entries here, though they arrive in clusters, not at that rate. The date of opening column runs from 1961 to 2004 across 29 dated rows, and the 1960s alone account for 8 of them, so the building effort here came in waves rather than evenly.

The dated entries carry 24 distinct opening years across 43 years, and the median opening year is 1978. The material on this page is held in 8 captions rather than in running text, 51 words of it, each written against the image or row it belongs to by the compiler who put the page together.

One of those 37 is recorded as under construction or planned, Neue Strelasund at 2.8 km, so the count includes it while every measured figure — the range, the median, the total — describes the 36 rows carrying traffic today: an unopened bore cannot hold a record. The longest entry is Hochstraße Elbmarsch, at 4.36 km.

35 of the 37 rows carry an entry in the notes column — 95 per cent of the table — and that column is where the qualifications live: tube counts, closures, boundaries and the reason a figure reads the way it does. The Faroese crossings connect islands that had no fixed link at all within living memory.