The Auheim Main Bridge is a railway and road bridge in Hanau that crosses the Main and connects the Hanau districts of Großauheim and Klein-Auheim at Main kilometer 59.560.
The 240 meter long bridge was put into operation by the Hessian Ludwigsbahn in 1882 at railway line kilometer 86.27 as a five-part lattice box steel bridge for the single-track northern branch of the Odenwaldbahn, which connects Babenhausen with Hanau. During construction, the four power pillars made of red sandstone were built so wide that the line could have been expanded with a second track, but this never happened. Rather, this option was later used instead to run a road parallel to the Main. For this purpose, in 1925 the railway bridge was moved to the western pillar halves of the bridge and in 1941 a road bridge was built on the eastern half, which therefore only had one lane.
At the end of the Second World War, the railway bridge was destroyed by the retreating Wehrmacht and the road bridge was badly damaged. Both were then rebuilt. The single-lane route of the street, now Brückenstraße, had to be secured with traffic lights from 1952 due to increasing traffic and was closed to car traffic in 1982. Since then it has only been accessible to pedestrians and cyclists. With a clearance height of 4.38 m for shipping, the road bridge was the lowest in the course of the Rhine-Main-Danube waterway. In 2005, two bridge segments were raised by half a meter to the clearance height of the railway bridge.
Source: Wikipedia