Dillinger heavy plate for
the new Neckar Bridge
Setting sail with Dillinger LP plates
The impressive new Neckar Bridge is a 345 m long and 25 m wide four-track railway bridge between Stuttgart Main Station and Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt Station. It runs over two abutments and six pier axes. With its innovative design as a steel sail bridge, it also shapes the future cityscape in the immediate vicinity of Stuttgart’s sights, such as Wilhelma, Seilerwasen and Rosenstein Castle.
A separate 4.50 m wide footbridge for pedestrians and cyclists hangs under the construction to connect both banks of the Neckar. This opened to public traffic in May 2021 while the railway bridge is not scheduled to open to traffic until after the completion of the total work.
Engineering and construction challenges
The spatial (mineral water protection zone), temporal, logistical, functional and technical restrictions associated with the construction site inspired and conditioned the innovative – so far unique in the world – mixed form of trough and cable-stayed bridge. Here, the double function of the lateral steel sails must be considered. They serve not only as part of the bridge structure but also as sound insulation.
A bridge of special features thanks to Dillinger steel solutions
The elegant steel sails, which give the bridge its unique shape, are made of massive steel plates, the thickness of which increases steadily over the course of the tension chords to the mast heads. In order to be able to achieve this, so-called longitudinally profiled plates (LP plates) from Dillinger were used in thicknesses of up to 125 mm. These are plates in which the plate thickness varies in a controlled manner over the plate length. For the highly stressed mast heads at the end of the steel sails, plate thicknesses of up to 200 mm (in the middle beam) were even required, which was realized using special S460QL plates with toughness requirements significantly exceeding the standard. Thus, in this impressive project, high strength fine grained structural steel plates with thicknesses greater than 100 mm were even used for the first time on a railway bridge in the DB AG network. Another special feature for this bridge is the use of very heavy TM plates S460 ML > 30 t to reduce the construction site joints in the sails.
For this bridge of special features, Dillinger supplied approx. 1,600 t of heavy plate in the grades S355J2+N, S355N/NL, S460N/NL, S460QL and S460ML in thicknesses from 15 to 200 mm.
