Újpest railway bridge, Railway bridge in northern Budapest, Hungary.
The Újpest railway bridge carries the Budapest–Esztergom line across the Danube and over the Népsziget island. Its dark green steel deck sits on a flat top chord above repeating triangular truss sections forming X patterns, carried by concrete piers rising from the water. The 2008 rebuild replaced the steel superstructure and reinforced the piers; a short piece of the old bridge is kept as a walkable exhibit in the Hungarian Railway History Park.
The Esztergom line's owner, the Italian firm Fratelli Marsiglia et Co., had the single-track bridge built from 1894; the steelwork was made at the Hungarian State Railways machine factory, and trains began using it on 3 November 1896. Retreating German troops blew it up at Christmas 1944; one surviving span served as a railway bridge at Simontornya until 2001. The rebuilt bridge, using elements of the dismantled "K" bridge from the Összekötő railway bridge, opened in 1955.
The bridge is often wrongly called the Northern Connecting Railway Bridge, a name that likely arose from the symmetry of Budapest's rail bridges. In fact it was built only for the Esztergom line, while the Southern Connecting Bridge is the Körvasút link between Kelenföld and Ferencváros. Since 2009 a footpath and a marked cycle path have run along the northern walkway.
The bridge carries a pedestrian walkway and a marked cycle path on its northern side, reopened on 30 May 2009 after the 2008 rebuild. Trains run on the Budapest–Esztergom line, with stops at Aquincum on the Buda bank and Újpest on the Pest bank; Újpest-városkapu metro station (line M3) lies at the Pest end. The Népsziget bank and the Pest-side embankment give the closest views of the green trusses and the piers.
The rebuilt bridge reused steel from the temporary "K" bridge dismantled at the Összekötő railway bridge, and its 1955 test loading used four locomotives of the 424 series. One span of the original bridge survived the 1944 demolition and served as a railway bridge at Simontornya until 2001.
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