One of the strangest sights I have ever seen was seeing vehicles driving up from the sea onto a road and vehicles driving down into the sea. It was weird watching cars and transport trucks pop out of the water.
I was on a ship on the Baltic Sea between Sweden and Denmark, doing a few laps around the ship on the walking deck, when I saw this huge high bridge in the distance to our right. The bridge was very long but curved. I got my binoculars to have a better look at the bridge structure.
What I saw was rather fascinating. Below the deck of the bridge ran a fast-moving train. At the end of the bridge the train and the road vehicles travelled on a long roadway, a sort of dyke, and then they suddenly dropped out of sight and under the water.
I saw the world’s longest single bridge connecting two countries that carried both road and rail traffic.
The Oresund Bridge, a joint Danish/Swedish hybrid name: Oresundsbron — or the Oresund Connection is a combined two-track rail and four-lane road bridge across the Oresund Strait. It is the longest combined road and rail bridge in Europe. It took five years to build the bridge.
There was a delay in construction when live WW2 bombs were discovered on the ocean floor. It took a few months to do a complete search of the area and dismantle the bombs that were found.
The Oresund Bridge was opened on July 1, 2000. The bridge links Denmark and Sweden together for the first time since the Ice Age. The tunnel, the new road built from material excavated from the sea to build the tunnel, and the bridge covers 17 km between Malmo in Sweden and Copenhagen in Denmark.
Being a Scandinavian project, it was built according to the principles of Danish Lego and Swedish Ikea — from a sort of flat-pack, prefabricated tunnel-and-bridge kit.
The tunnel, for example, was not drilled underground. It consists of 20 massive prefabricated sections, each built on land with the tubes for road and railway built-in.
The sections were floated out to sea and lowered from barges into a groove cut out of the limestone seabed. Each section was twice the length of a football pitch and weighed 55,000 tonnes.
The bridge curves over the sea, so that even as you drive along it you can appreciate its shape.
Most of the bridge construction was done in Sweden and Denmark, but the huge concrete piers were built in Spain and floated over by large barges.
The bridge has one of the longest cable-stayed main spans in the world at 490 metres. The height of the tallest pillar is 204 meteres. The total length of the bridge is 7,845 metres, which is approximately half the distance between the Swedish and Danish landmasses.
The rest of the distance is spanned by the artificial island “Peberholm” (4,055 metres), followed by a tunnel (3,510 metres) on the Danish side.
The two rail tracks are beneath the four-lane road lanes. The bridge has a vertical clearance of 57 metres, although most boat traffic still passes over the Drogden Strait, where the tunnel lies. That’s where our ship was headed. And unknown to us, we passed over the tunnel, which is down 21 metres.
Toll prices are high and it is said the bridge will be paid off by 2035.
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