Monitoring of a Large Railway Arch Bridge

During the partially reconstruction of the Pyhrn railroad line from the Austrian Federal Railways between Linz and Selzthal instead of the old Steyrtalbridge from 1905 a new arch bridge over an storage reservoir was built in 2014. The new bridge is built in reinforced concrete with a length of about 180m. The design of the structure was determined by the rail-track-interaction as it was essential to avoid using rail expansion joints as expensive and maintenance-intensive components. For this reason, extensive measurements should provide information on the structural behavior and are compared with the assumptions and results of the structural analysis. In addition to measurements during an initial loading test the structural behaviour over the seasonal cycle should be determined by measurements. The installed monitoring system stores data since November 2014.