Botlekbrug - Botlek RT, NL - Vertical Lift Bridges on Waymarking.com

The Botlek bridge is quite an impressive lift bridge, 1,200 meters long with two movable lifting parts, each the size of a football field, and a span of 92 meters. This makes it one of the largest lifts in Europe. When closed, the bridge has a clearance height of almost 15 meters, which greatly reduces the number of bridge openings per day compared to the old bridge. The vertical clearance when open is 45 meters. The horizontal clearance is two times 87.35 meters.

The 6 concrete lift towers (actually, if you look closely, there are 8 of them) are each 58 meters high, giving the bridge a striking appearance in an otherwise very industrial environment. The counterweight has the name "Botlek" on it in bas-relief. The idea here is that visible naming increases the identity of the object. The pull cables on the counterweights run down via large wheels at the top of the heads of the towers on the outside. There they are attached to the end sleepers of the bridge decks.

The Botlekbrug is one of the largest and especially heaviest lifting bridges of its kind. An important part of the new bridge is the bridge lifting installation, which ensures that the bridge deck of 5,000 tons goes up and down 31 meters in a flash.

In spite of all these very impressive figures, the installation of the bridge was accompanied by considerable setbacks. On February 26, 2015, even before the delivery, a sea tanker sailed against both the old and the new bridge. After the opening, there were start-up problems too. In the first three years, the bridge was confronted with no fewer than 117 technical failures. In addition, the connection of the train tracks turned out to be anything but flawless. To make matters even worse, a major construction fault was discovered not long after delivery.

Sources: Wikipedia, Wegenwiki

Visit Instructions:
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Date Logged Log   08/19/2020 Theodd1 visited it 04/27/2020 StefandD visited it

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