And the winner is…

The Muiderberg railway bridge, which enables rail traffic east of Amsterdam via the extended A1 motorway, was impressive already when it was completed in 2016. This year the bridge has been honored with the Dutch Steel Award 2018 in the infrastructure category. 

In the course of a large-scale road extension, it was necessary to replace the existing concrete railway viaduct with a new steel railway bridge. This presented special challenges for the construction and the steel:  the bridge needed to span the motorway without intermediate supports but still be streamlined and light, and the prefabricated parts needed to be easy to assemble on site.  Quality steel from Dillingen played a “major supporting role“ here.

Spanning 255 meters, with a width of 17 meters and height of 55 meters, the “Zandhazenbrug,” as the Dutch call it, is the longest railway bridge in the Netherlands and one of the largest arched bridges in Europe.  Dillinger supplied the biggest part – 8,200 out of a total 8,400 metric tons of steel – for the arch-bridge, which enabled the motorway to be bridged without intermediate supports. Around 7,000 metric tons of this was S460M/ML-grade thermomechanically rolled steel.

Using heavy plate in this grade enabled the weight to be reduced by almost 30%. This made it possible to achieve important goals for the construction regarding the weight and transport of the bridge. The quality of the steel meanwhile also reduced the amount of raw material used and the total welding volume, which had a positive effect on overall energy consumption.

These and other aspects related to efficiency, innovation and construction, along with the architectural achievement, have now been honored with the Dutch Steel Award. The Muiderberg railway bridge thus joins the list of award-winning projects for which Dillinger has supplied steel: the Messe Stuttgart exhibition halls and multi-storey car park, for example, as well as the Gustave Flaubert lift bridge in Rouen, the Simone de Beauvoir pedestrian bridge in Paris, the Pierre Mauroy Stade in Lille and the Lochkov Valley Bridge near Prague.

Further information:

Dillinger heavy plate for the Dutch railway bridge Muiderberg