Griethausener Eisenbahnbrücke, Steel railway bridge in Kleve, Germany

The Griethausener Eisenbahnbrücke, also called Altrheinbrücke, carries a single-track railway over a dead arm of the Rhine near Griethausen. Its main span is a 100.43 m (320 Prussian feet) wrought-iron truss with two parallel-chord girders, followed by a foreland bridge of twenty simple truss girders; the whole structure measures about 528 m. The slender lattice bars, cross-braced only at mid-span, explain its fine-grained appearance.

Built between 1863 and 1865 by the Rheinische Eisenbahn-Gesellschaft under Emil Hermann Hartwich for the Linksniederrheinische Strecke, the bridge spanned a dead arm of the Rhine toward Elten and Zevenaar; the river itself was crossed by train ferry until 1912. Passenger service over the bridge to Griethausen ran until 1960, freight to an oil mill at Spyck until 1987. The line was then closed; the bridge passed to the Eisenbahnfreunde Goch-Kleve in 1996 and was auctioned to architect Michael Wilmsen in 2016.

The bridge crosses a dead arm of the Rhine on the route toward Elten and Zevenaar, and the river itself was crossed by a train ferry until that service ended in 1912. Passenger trains ran over the bridge to Griethausen until 1960, freight to an oil mill at Spyck until 1987. Since 1996 the bridge has belonged to the Eisenbahnfreunde Goch-Kleve, and in 2016 the Kalkar architect Michael Wilmsen bought it at auction.

The bridge is closed to walkers and cyclists, so it can only be viewed from outside. The structure crosses the Old Rhine near Griethausen, a district of Kleve, with the main truss over the water and the long foreland bridge over the floodplain. The surrounding dike paths give clear side views of the ironwork.

The bridge is made of puddled wrought iron, not steel: its low carbon and high phosphorus content, with traces of copper and nickel, make it rust almost not at all. The last protective coat was applied in the second half of the 1920s, and the material still resists corrosion today.