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Hetzdorfer Viaduct

The Hetzdorfer Viaduct is a listed former railway bridge of the double-track Dresden-Werdau railway line over the Flöha valley in Hetzdorf near Falkenau in Saxony. With a height of 43 m, it was the highest single-storey bridge of the German Reichsbahn. The Hetzdorf viaduct is 328 m long with four large arches in the middle of the valley with a clear width of 22.66 m. The bridge describes a circle with a radius of 572 m in plan. Blue-gray gneiss, granite and Pirna sandstone were used as building materials. The bridge was built between 1866 and 1868 as the last of the 138 bridges between Dresden and Chemnitz. In 1868, the first locomotive drove over the newly built viaduct. The second track was completed in 1869.  The first repair work was carried out in 1928. From 1965, a slow-speed section was located on the viaduct. In the 1960s, a speed limit of 50 km/h was initially introduced due to damage to the sealing. This was later reduced to 30 km/h and finally to 20 km/h. The Council of Ministers of the German Democratic Republic, DDR, decided in 1986 to bypass the Hetzdorf viaduct with a new route 2,033.9 m long and up to 16.8 per thousand steep and to close the viaduct to rail traffic. Due to a lack of construction capacity, work could not begin until mid-1987. The new section of the route went into regular operation in 1992, initially with one track. The route with the old bridge was closed on the same day. The second track on the new line was put into operation in 1992.  After the old viaduct was secured  and prepared as a hiking trail. Since then, it has been part of the Baltic Sea-Saale Dams long-distance hiking trail between Oederan and Augustusburg.
 

January 27th,  2025

 

 
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