Used to be, anyway.

If you want to cross the Rhine anywhere between Wiesbaden and Koblenz ( a good hour’s drive) , you’re stuck with using ferries.

Ferry operators are happy, tradesmen based on one side of the river with a customer base on the other less so. It’s not that the ferry fare is exorbitant (unless you’re a bike and pay almost as much as a car. Bastards) – it’s the question of who pays for your workers while they’re waiting for the ferry and trundling across the river.

There have been feeble attempts to bridge the gap (as it were), but it wasn’t always that way.

There was the Hindenburg railway bridge, connecting Bingen and Rüdesheim and named after Paul von Hindenburg, WW1 general and later Reichspresident.

Didn’t last long, though.

Finished in 1915, knocked over by the Wehrmacht in 1945 to prevent the Allies (who had boats…) from crossing the Rhine.

After the war, the railways decided they didn’t need it, the population density didn’t support a reconstruction and the pillars impeded the shipping on the Rgine.

Bang.

This is all that’s left

28 Sep This entry was published on 28 September, 2012 at 13:00. It’s filed under Architecture, History, Mainz, Transport and tagged Bingen, Paul von Hindenburg, Rüdesheim, Schierstein. Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post.