The water damage cannot be overlooked.

A gray cone, formed by seeping water, hangs on one of the arches of the historic railway viaduct in Neu-Anspach, almost like in a stalactite cave.

Otherwise you can see from the building that a renovation is necessary.

Cracks and discoloration on the underside of the arches show the marks left by moisture when it gnaws at a structure for decades.

Jan Schiefenhoevel

Editor in the Rhein-Main-Zeitung.

  • Follow I follow

The Hochtaunus transport association, owner of the railway line that runs on the viaduct, wants to repair this damage.

The work began this week, will take a year and a half and cost three million euros, as the managing director of the transport association, Frank Denfeld, explains during a tour of the construction site.

The rail traffic on this section of the route is interrupted for the two weeks of the Easter holidays, so that work can be done without danger.

What you can't see from the outside are the cavities that have formed inside the massive bridge pillars due to the moisture.

The voids make the supports unstable.

Designers and builders got an idea of ​​the interior of the material by drilling into the twelve-meter-high pillars from the top of the viaduct.

Extracted drill cores show where there is solid matter made of quartzite blocks and where there is crumbly mortar.

The renovation takes time because it is expensive to eliminate the hollow areas.

According to Denfeld, the masonry is drilled every 20 to 30 centimeters to fill the cavities with liquid concrete, which is injected under pressure.

About 1500 holes have to be drilled for this.

On the upper side, the viaduct must also be sealed against the ingress of moisture.

To do this, the trough, as the experts call the channel, in which the ballast of the track bed lies, must be cleared out.

250 tons of track ballast have to be moved, which is only possible if the viaduct is closed to trains.

Another interruption to rail traffic is planned for the summer holidays.

Work is also planned on the surface.

The stones are thoroughly cleaned and repointed so that the historic building will make a good impression again after the renovation.

The railway viaduct dates from 1895 and characterizes the townscape of Neu-Anspach.

With six arches, it carries the single-track railway line, which is known today as the Taunusbahn, 70 meters long and spans Bahnhofstrasse and the Usa river.

The pillars are made of natural stone, for the arches supporting vaults were built of bricks in the 19th century.

The viaduct was renovated once before in the 1960s, but by what was then the Federal Railways, according to District Administrator Ulrich Krebs (CDU).

However, according to him, the work was not carried out well, not in the way that the historic building should have been.

The concrete used at the time is still hanging from the underside of the arches where it had been sprayed.

There has been construction work on the Taunusbahn route since 2020 anyway. The Hochtaunus transport association is having the interlockings and signals and the necessary lines renewed.

Two other bridges in Naunstadt and near Wilhelmsdorf, also more than 100 years old, have already been renewed in the course of this work, as Denfeld explains.

According to him, the railway line will be prepared for the planned electrification and for the expansion to an S-Bahn line.