Rolling home, dear land, to thee.
Integral bridge building, XXL size! In German, a taxiway bridge is called a “rolling bridge”, but the bridges themselves do not roll: heavy commercial aircraft roll over them while rail and road traffic rolls underneath.
As part of the construction of the north-west landing runway at Frankfurt Airport, two connecting taxiways were built from the new runway to the airport’s existing operating areas. These taxiways carry the aircraft over a high-speed rail line, the A3 autobahn and local and service roads. Thus, five different taxiway bridges were constructed. A whole range of constraints needed to be taken into account in the planning and construction: heavy aircraft loads, complex geometries, limited space, a busy motorway, and so on. The largest of these taxiway bridges traverses the ICE rail line and the autobahn with 3 sections and a length of 90 metres. It has an extremely sharp crossing angle of only 27 degrees. The result is a remarkable total width of 220 metres.
The bridge was planned and implemented as an integral structure made of pre-stressed concrete, composed of one- to three-section frames with individual span lengths of some 30 metres. Prefabricated components were used with local concrete enhancements and drag plates behind the abutments. With the Frankfurt taxiway bridges, unique bridge structures have been created as intersections for road, rail and air traffic axes.
© Fraport, BIN, Fraport, Sebastian Suchanek / Peter Rehs / Hendrik Dobberthien, Willi Wilhelm / Fraport, BIN, Fraport / BIN, Fraport, Fraport, BIN, Lothar Hoinkis / Jürgen Bergmann
