Reconstruction of the Southern Connecting Railway Bridge in Budapest

The Southern connecting railway bridge is Hungary's most important and busiest railway link on the river Danube, in the centre of Budapest. The condition of the existing old superstructure required its reconstruction. The reconstruction had to be carried out in such a way as to maintain double-track rail traffic while the bridges were being rebuilt. The reconstruction involved building a new superstructure, transferring traffic to the new bridge and demolishing an old bridge. The operation was repeated once again and then the third bridge was built. To accommodate the superstructures, we had to reconfigure and raise the existing pillars. The steel structures were fabricated in our own plant and prefabricated in a local port in 80-metre long and 500-tonnes pieces. The bridge elements were floated to the site, where they were lifted by two floating cranes onto a self-developed heavy lifting system. It consisted of 4 to 4 lifting towers mounted on 2 barges of 52 m length, on which the floating units were positioned perpendicular to the longitudinal axis of the barges. The floating units were lifted onto the scaffolds and were moved to the lower lifting level by 2 pushers to the lifting position, where they were lifted to the height of the pushing plane by the lifting platform. Subsequently, the bridge was pushed into position according to the site-plan. The pushing operations were complicated by the fact that the adjacent bridges were within the distance of half a metre. After closing the bridge steel structure, the railway track was placed, a test load was applied and the railway traffic started. The demolition of the two old bridges and the construction of the three new railway bridges took a total of 36 months to plan and build.