1Industrialization and urbanization in Western and Central Europe, including the Czech lands under the Habsburg monarchy, changed the appearance of the landscape (Semotanová 2016) from the 1830s onwards, but with a more pronounced impact in the second half of the 19th century. The landscape changed under the influence of agrarian, mining, industrial activity and factory production, and this development necessitated the building of a communications infrastructure, particularly a road and rail network, accompanied by telegraphic connections. The railway thus became both a product of industrialisation and an instrument of it.
- 2 In this work Gerstner stated that the construction of waterways in the Czech lands was too expensiv (...)
2Two horse-railways were the first to be established in the Czech territory at the turn of the 1820s and 1830s. First from České Budějovice to Linz (functional in years 1825-1872), (Brunner, Hajn 2007) and than from Prague to Lány and the Křivoklát forests to the iron ore reserves (functional in years 1830-1873), (Švarc 1998). However, after the abandonment of the waterway system (the Danube-Oder-Labe water corridor), the emphasis in the Czech lands was placed on the steam railway systém (Gerstner 1804)2. The first steam train arrived from Vienna to the Moravian town of Brno in 1839. Prague (Krejčiřík 1992) then the capital of the Bohemian Kingdom, was connected to the centre of the monarchy, Vienna, via Olomouc in Moravia as early as the summer of 1845 (Förster, Demarteau 1845). The greatest development of railway construction in the Czech lands occurred during the economic boom after the Prusso-Austrian War, i.e. after 1866, when the basic railway network of 3 260 km was actually completed (privately and in the state sector) by 1875, used more for freight and transit transport through the Czech lands (Fiala 1932).
3The construction of railway lines was possible in the Czech lands thanks to the fact that engineers brought knowledge from abroad (mostly they participated in industrial world exhibitions, visited polytechnics or worked in foreign companies), they were educated in the field of mechanical engineering and steam engine construction at the Czech (German) Technical College in Prague, created on the model of the Ecole polytechnique in Prague in 1806 by František Josef Knight Gerstner (1756-1832), (Psota 1956), they gained further knowledge in professional associations (especially in the Society of Engineers and Architects Kingdom of Bohemia founded in 1865) and from reading specialist literature (Štrbáňová, Janko 1986). Thanks to this, engineers and their assistants were able to take advantage of the transferred foreign technical and technological knowledge and use it economically within the Czech lands. This is also an example of the knowledge of building metal bridges according to the Eiffel model, not only in the Czech lands applied in many of its locations, but also throughout Europe.
Fig. 1. Diploma of Engineer Šípek.
Authors archive, SOA Nepomuk, fond: Česká západní dráha, kar. 3, č.j. 863 - Plán Radbuzského mostu 1863, Absolutorium inženýra Šípka
- 3 The route led from Prague via Pilsen to Furth im Wald to the border with Germany.
4As part of the extensive work on the construction of railways in the Czech lands, the privately-owned Czech Western Railway (K.k. privilegierte Böhmische Westbahn-BWB)3 was established, among others, whose chief engineer Jan Werner considered the Western Railway to be the backbone for the Czech lands and aimed to fulfil five objectives with its construction:
51) to connect Prague with the states of southern and central Germany;
2) to increase the political and economic importance of the city of Pilsen, the capital of the West Bohemian region and a city of industrial importance (the engineering firm Škoda 1869 and the brewery 1843);
3) securing railway connections with the important metallurgical and industrial areas of western Bohemia (Ejpovice, Radnicko, Pilsen);
4) the creation of a smaller coal line to connect the Radnice mines with the Czech Western Railway – this line became part of the railway in the Radnice and coal mine area, and
5) the integration of the Radnice coal mines into the Austrian railway infrastructure (Bělohlávek, Vainad, Písecký 1987).
6The construction of the Czech Western Railway, which ran from Prague via Pilsen to Furth im Wald to the border with Germany, was divided into 7 parts from the very beginning. Each part had its headquarters in a town close to the line. The towns were: Prague, Beroun, Žebrák, Rokycany, Pilsen, Stod and Domažlice. Each part of the line also had its own section engineer, who was assisted by two co-workers. The workforce working on the construction was very diverse in terms of nationality. The majority were Czechs, of course, but Slovaks, Germans, Poles and Italian stonemasons also participated in the work (Bělohlávek, et al. 1987).
7After the concession law was passed (Havelka 1992), coal mining companies were the main drivers in railway construction and most of the lines were mainly directed to the mining sites (Tazbirek 2018). This is also the case of the aforementioned Chrást-Radnice coal area (Hončík 2006) within the Czech Western Railway on the Ejpovice-Radnice line (line number 176 according to the timetable), where a metal bridge over the Klabava River was built in the 1860s, similar to the Eiffel works. The article focuses on the technical and economic aspects of the construction of the bridge at Chrast over the Klabava River, and on the later conservation of this unique bridge in western Bohemia.
- 4 The Klabava is a river in the Pilsen Region, a right-side tributary of the Berounka River. Its leng (...)
8At present, the area around the Klabava River4 is more of a recreational area and is interesting for boating, as the Klabava is relatively wild during the rainy season, otherwise it has a fluctuating flow. The Klabava River shapes the surrounding landscape and was part of the industrial area around the city of Pilsen in the 19th century. The Pilsen region was one of the most industrially developed areas in the Czech lands from the beginning of the 19th century, as larger industrial enterprises were established in Pilsen around the middle of the 19th century. For example, on 5th October 1842, the Měšt'anský pivovar (nowadays the world-famous Pilsner Urquell, the so-called Pilsner-type beer) was founded (Hlaváček 1967), and in 1866, the originally aristocratic Valdštejn Engineering Works (founded in 1859) expanded when it was purchased by Emil Škoda (1839-1900) (Korandová et al 2016), and laid the foundations for the later First Republic of Czechoslovakia's very successful engineering and metallurgical company Škoda Plzeň (Nohovcová, Mazný, Šrámek 2009).
9Particularly for the Škoda company, other industrial activities such as wood, paper, leather, chemical industry, fuel and energy industry and mining industry (ores, sands, stone, coal) were established in Pilsen (Heicl 2019).
- 5 Operation on the section 176: Ejpovice-Chrást-Plzeň was started in 1862, on the section to Stupno i (...)
10In the second half of the 19th century, the mining of coal and its transport to Plzeň became the basis not only for the construction of the Ejpovice-Chrást-Radnice5 coal railway connecting to the main line Prague-Plzeň, but also for the design and construction of the bridge over the valley of the Klabava River.
- 6 Among other things, he was at the birth of the Kladno Coal Mining Company (1847), the Kladno Ironwo (...)
11The treaty concluded between Bavaria and Austria in 1856 was important for the establishment of the Czech Western Railway for the Prague-Plzeň line to the German border. The aim of this treaty was to establish direct railway connections between the two countries. The intention to build this railway link was also prevalent among the Czech nobility. This idea was supported by important noble families such as the Thurn-Taxis family. A merchant-noble consortium was also formed to realise this project. In 1857, this group obtained a concession to build a railway. However, the consortium was unable to raise sufficient capital to build the railway. For this reason, successful provincial businessmen such as the shipbuilder Vojtěch Lanna, Sr. (1805-1866)6 and the bourgeois businessmen Klein brothers (Popelka 2011) contributed to the project. They were also granted the concession to build the Imperial Royal Privileged Bohemian Western Railway (BWB) on 8th September 1859. However, this new business combination also got into disputes over the further financing of the project. Therefore, the entrepreneurial Klein family took full control of the project (Schreier 2009).
12A total of 446 bridges were built on the Czech Western Railway, 65 were iron bridges (Bělohlávek, et al 1987). Most of the iron bridges were equipped with the so-called Schifkorn girders at the beginning of the 1860s (Bukowsky 1865:93-100). The idea of girders, which created the first possibilities of typification and prefabrication in the construction of metal bridges, was first put into practice by the Austrian engineer Rudolf Schifkorn (1817-1882) in 1854 (Keiml 1994). In 1853, Schifkorn was granted the privilege of a new bridge system with cast-iron and forged girders, and in 1869 he submitted further improvements. With the practical application of his system of bridge construction, Schifkorn initially found acceptance among experts. Between 1856 and 1868, 116 railway bridges were built for the Austrian railways according to his calculations and plans as well as his new system of bridge construction.
Fig. 2. The plan of Radbusa Bridge
Authors archive, The plan of Radbusa Bridge SOA Nepomuk, fond: Česká západní dráha, kar. 4, č.j. 863 - Plán Radbuzského mostu 1863
- 7 The structure of the building is precisely described in the work VELFLÍK, Vojtěch, Stavitelství mos (...)
13The basis of Schifkorn's system was the composite straight-span truss. The upper flange and the crossbars were made of cast iron, the lower drawn flanges of flat iron and the vertical flanges of bar wrought iron. The verticals were threaded at the ends and the necessary prestressing was introduced into the structure by tightening the bolts. The design thus offered several advantages: easy manufacture and transport, saving iron at the expense of cast iron, and simple assembly at the chosen location from modular parts. As a result, Schifkorn beams spread with extraordinary speed in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Bridges7 with spans of up to 57 m could be assembled from the finished parts in a short time.
14Rudolf Schifkorn discussed the use of his system with British and American companies in their countries, but without success. Unfortunately, on 4 March 1868, one span of Schifkorn's bridge construction on the Prut River, on the Lemberg-Czernowitz (Halicz-Bukovina) line, collapsed under a moving train. The technical problems of the Schifkorn system had already been pointed out before the collapse of the Prut River bridge by Professor Wilhelm Bukovsky of the Prague Technical University (Rotter, Ryjáček and Pospíšil 2023), but his articles on the Schifkorn girders were not considered until after the collapse of the bridge.
- 8 In 1844 the Klein brothers acquired the Loučná nad Desnou estate including the ironworks in Sobotín (...)
15Thereafter, within the monarchy, Schifkorn girders were replaced on bridges mainly by steel structures, as they stemmed from concerns about the collapse of other bridges when structural defects of Schifkorn girders were discovered, mainly due to lateral displacement of the nodes. Replacements in the monarchy continued until 1894. Nevertheless, Schifkorn's idea was taken up by the Klein brothers (Schreier 2009), builders of most of the railways in the Czech lands, in cooperation with other entrepreneurs in the metallurgical (e.g. the Rothschilds, founders of the Vitkovice Ironworks in 1828) and engineering sectors. At that time, bridge components were also produced in large quantities at the Sobotín Ironworks8 in the Šumperk region, which was then owned by the Kleins. Schifkorn's construction was first used in the construction of the Pardubice-Liberec railway (South German Connecting Railway - k.k. priv. Süd-norddeutsche Verbindungsbahn – SNDVB) in 1858 (Ederer 1959) on the bridge in Austria near Turnov over the Jizera River, followed by others from 1861 on the line of the Czech Western Railway (BWB) in Dolní Mokropsy near Prague over the Berounka River, in Plzeň, near Holýšov and Chrást near Pilsen over the Klabava River (Pavlíček 2002).
16The track we are looking at was built as part of the Czech Western Railway from Chrast to Horní Stupno, where the Klabava River had to be crossed. The construction of this line was decided since a decree of the Ministry of Trade of 18 May 1862 (Bělohlávek, et al 1987). To speed up the connection of the Radnice coalfield to the main Prague-Plzeň line, the Klabava valley was bridged with a temporary six-storey wooden structure with a length of 190 m and a height of 38 m in the North American style. Thus, the branch line from Chrast to Horní Stupno could be put into operation as early as 1 April 1863, i.e. less than 10 months after the start of construction.
17The whole railway was 9.7 km long. The line had only 2 stops, namely Chrast and Horní Stupno. The locomotives for the Czech Western Railway came from two companies, Sigi, based in Vienna, and Maffei, based in Munich. The wagons were supplied by Ringhoffer from Prague-Smíchov (Hlavačka et al 2019). Every day, 6-7 wagons fully loaded with coal were transported from Horní Stupno to Chrást. Two wagons were used by the Czech Western Railway for its own operation, the rest were exported to German countries. The mining in the Radnicka Basin itself was financially costly due to the obsolete mining method (Bělohlávek, et al. 1987).
- 9 SOA Nepomuk, fond : Česká západní dráha (Czech Western Railway), kar. 129, č. spisu 20410, Vložení (...)
18The original wooden bridge was later used as a scaffolding and support structure for the construction of a bridge with an iron structure (Zuffer 1898:285-286). The bridge with three spans of identical length of 3 x 37 m used Schifkorn beams. It was carried by stone piers and supported on the side by stone terraces. It was completed in October 1863. The iron structure was supplied by the Klein brothers' ironworks from Sobotín. With its height of 38 m, it was the highest railway bridge in the Pilsen region and the second highest bridge in the Habsburg Monarchy at that time. It therefore aroused considerable public interest. As a result of the technical problems that led to the collapse of the bridge over the Prut River, the Schifkorn girders on the Klabava Bridge had to be rebuilt with more modern technology. For this purpose, the Austrian Ministry allocated a special fund from which the reconstruction of the bridge was to be financed. The steel structure installed on the Klabava Bridge on 20 March 1876 was also to be inspected. The replacement of the Schifkorn girders over the Klabava River was also to be paid for from this fund9.
- 10 SOA Nepomuk, fond : Česká západní dráha, kar. 77, č. spisu 15121, Mosty soustavy Schiffkornovy, 21. (...)
- 11 SOA Nepomuk, fond : Česká západní dráha, kar. 77, č. spisu 15121, Mosty soustavy Schiffkornovy, 22. (...)
19K. K. Privat Union Westbahn, which was responsible for the maintenance and operation of the Czech Western Railway, submitted its report on the planned reconstruction of the Klabava Bridge and the replacement of the schifkorn girders to the Austrian Ministry. The company operating the Bohemian Western Railway also informed the Austrian Ministry of Trade that it had ordered the new iron structure of the bridge additionally from the Prague Ironworks Company. The actual reconstruction and replacement of the girders was scheduled to take place in the first half of 1892. In December 1891, the Austrian Ministry of Trade approved the entire project for the replacement of the bridge structure10. The private Western Railway Company wanted to be reimbursed for the replacement of the schifkorn girders on the bridge over the Klabava River. However, the Austrian Ministry of Trade stated that this was only a replacement of the existing iron structure on the Klabava Bridge. Therefore, the Austrian Ministry of Trade decided to grant the company's request. To support this opinion, reference was also made to the replacement of the bridges on the Ferdinand Northern Railway, where the replacement of the bridges was also carried out and paid for by a private company. The Austrian Ministry of Trade communicated its opinion to the Czech Western Railway on the 3 th September 189211.
Fig. 3. Dispatch note of Czech Western Railway
Authors archive, SOA Nepomuk, fond: Česká západní dráha, kar. 126, č.j. 20 410
20The reconstruction of the bridge itself was carried out as follows. At the beginning of the 1890s the Klabava Bridge was already in a very bad condition. The problem was mainly the iron skeleton of the bridge from the 1860s. Therefore, a new metal bridge structure made of riveted iron was ordered from the First Czech-Moravian Factory in Prague-Libeň. The finished structure in its entirety was subsequently transported by rail to the Klabava Bridge. Tracks were built near the bridge, where the entire bridge structure was assembled. It was expected that traffic on the line Chrást-Horní Stupno would be interrupted for three days. The whole work on the bridge was organized and managed by engineer Jan Šiller (Bělohlávek, et al. 1987).
21Together with Šiller, the employees of the Prague bridge Works, engineers Müller and František Prášil, which was part of the First Czech-Moravian machine factory in Prague-Libeň, were also present. The replacement of the structure was made by the Prague Bridge Works, which was then managed by František Prášil. After visiting the World Industrial Exhibition in Paris in 1889, he was influenced by the construction of the Eiffel Tower above the exhibition centre, and therefore his designs of bridge and tower structures for the Czech lands were strikingly similar to the construction of the famous Paris tower. The transfer of knowledge and innovations to the Czech lands worked well.
22However, the situation with the bridge deck replacement was different from the three-day replacement plan. As of 07:00 am on 2nd August 1892, the riveted new structure of the Klabava Bridge with three spans was to be placed on the four original stone bridge piers. The first span was wheeled on carts to the old span and fixed about five metres above the piers so that the old substructure could be dismantled. After its removal, about 60 fitters started lowering the new structure with the so-called ratchets into the old bed. After a full day's effort, the new structure was only about one metre above the piers in the evening when the workers suddenly felt a sharp jerk at 18h30 and the entire 730 tons structure fell sharply onto one of the piers, while the other end of the structure shifted more than 2.5 metres to the left and remained stuck above the water, supported only by the corner of the pier. This was a fatal situation for the workers below. The tragic accident killed 3 workers and scarred 9 others for life (Bělohlávek, et al. 1987).
23The structure remained trapped on the bridge piers, from where it had to be intricately placed in the necessary location. On 25th August 1892, traffic was restored on the bridge, but work was still in progress. The second bridge span was replaced between 2nd and 5th September. The third and final bridge arch was successfully replaced on October 5-8, 1892. The height of the bridge in 1892 was 25.7 m, and the total length of the bridge was 105 m. According to the original plans for the bridge repair, a double-track superstructure was to be built, but for capacity reasons this extension was not carried out.
Fig. 4 The Bridge over Klabava river
ŽÁKAVEC, Teodor, Lanna – příspěvek k dějinám hospodářského vývoje v Čechách a v Československu, Praha 1936, p. 195
24Since 1892, the single-track bridge structure over the Klabava River with three openings consists of a riveted steel beam truss structure identical in all bridge openings, supported by two prismatic masonry piers made of stone blocks. The span of the main girders is 37 m and their spacing is 2.8 m. The trusses are a composite system with a straight upper flange and a parabolically curved lower flange. The height of the beam above the support is 1.5 m and the centre span is 4.5 m. The elemental bridge deck consists of crossbeams and stringers on which oak bridge beams are placed in plan. The structural condition of the bridge has deteriorated over time due to degrading corrosion protection, which was last carried out in 1938.
25The Klabava Bridge12 served until 2000, when it was determined that repairs to the superstructure were necessary. However, this was not carried out and in 2003 traffic over the Klabava Bridge was threatened with closure. Finally, in 2002-2003, a complete repair of the bridge was carried out, which included repair of the superstructure including replacement of the rails, repair of the structure including reinforcement and corrosion protection and repair of the horizontal surfaces of the storage thresholds of the lower structure. The main beams and stringers were strengthened in all three steel structures, the upper and lower bracing was replaced including the revision footbridge, and the railings and sidewalk timbers were replaced. The bridge was repaired at a cost of approximately 6.5 million Czech crowns (i.e. now approximately 265,251, 989 Euros) per span. During the repair of the bridge, 23 tons of old items were removed, and 52 tons of new items were delivered. By saving this unique structure, it was possible to maintain traffic on the Chrást – Stupno line, which celebrated its 160th anniversary in 2023.
- 13 The International Council on Monuments and Sites ICOMOS. Venice, Italy, 25-31 May 1964. UNESCO Conv (...)
26The bridge over the Klabava River is one of the few structures on Czech territory that is often said to have been built by Gustave Eiffel or to have come from his workshop or his engineers, but this is not the case. It was the result of the work of engineers and technicians who came from the Czech lands. The bridge is not even currently declared an engineering monument. Nevertheless, the values created by the railway, contained in the monuments13 from the time of the railway's creation to the present day, are part of the cultural heritage of individual countries, including the Czech lands, and are still largely in use. Often, they also serve their original purpose, in some cases uninterrupted for many decades, as a bridge over the Klabava River.
“The railway exists as a phenomenon, an abstract value that has influenced and is influencing not only Western civilization, industry, economy, the history of entire countries and the lives of individual people, but at the same time it represents concrete objects, individual buildings and groups of them, encompassing all sizes of objects worthy of attention, from entire lines, to bold bridges and magnificent stations, to a cardboard ticket or a spike connecting a sleeper and a rail” (Zlámaný 2010 :23).
27The landscape was influenced by progressive industrialisation and urbanisation, accompanied during the 19th century by agricultural, mining and then large-scale industrial activity, depending on the natural resources and raw materials in the different regions of Europe. This activity also required the construction of a modern communications infrastructure, mainly transport with road, river (maritime) and rail networks, often supplemented by a telegraph service. This was a prerequisite for the further economic development of individual countries.
28These activities would not have been possible without university-educated technicians, who contributed significantly to the industrial and urbanization efforts. They supplemented their knowledge by attending regularly recurring world industrial exhibitions, from which they transferred knowledge to their professional communities in their home countries, thus promoting business competitiveness and the development of technical and technological knowledge, distributed after the mid-19th century by numerous professional journals in the national languages.
29The transfer of technical knowledge also brought many technical and industrial innovations to the Czech lands, for which the Czech environment was already prepared by good education, professional association activities and business activities, which were still developing. The Czech lands were therefore able to compete strongly in the economic competition within the Habsburg monarchy, to which they belonged from the mid-16th century until 1918.
30One of the components of modernity, urbanism, but also a basic need for the transport of goods and materials became the railways, which in the Czech lands were completed in a backbone structure by 1875. Many rivers, valleys and mountain areas had to be bridged as part of these lines, and so industrial development included the construction of road and railway bridges, mostly metal after the mid-19th century. One of the many hundreds of bridges in the Czech lands was the bridge over the Klabava River in western Bohemia in the Pilsen region. This bridge was built in 1863 according to the Austrian state permits of the time and according to the technical Schifkorn system of cast iron and iron bridge parts, which were put together after prefabrication. This was a modern method of bridge construction, but not a well calculated and statically tested one, as W. Bykovský, a professor at the Czech Technical College in Prague, pointed out in his works.
31His criticism was only heard after the collapse of the bridge with the Schifkorn system on the Prut River in 1868. After that, other bridges in the monarchy had to be repaired, which took place until the mid-1890s. The bridge over the Klabava River on the Prague-Plzeň-German border was also in need of repair. The entire bridge structure was replaced by the Czech company Prague Bridge Factory of the First Czechoslovak Machine Factory in Prague-Libeň, where the director of the bridge factory, František Prášil, had already been influenced by the construction of the Eiffel Tower in Paris, which he had seen at the World Industrial Exhibition in Paris in 1889. The bridge and tower structures he designed thereafter were strikingly similar to the famous Parisian tower. Nevertheless, the bridge over the Klabava River is not directly related to the activities of Gustave Eiffel or his company and was created by the activity and inventiveness of Czech technicians and engineers.
32At present, the bridge over the Klabava River, like the Chrást-Stupno railway as a part of the Western Czech Railway, is celebrating 160 years of full technical activity after the overhaul in 2002-2003; the bridge is not even declared a cultural monument. Nevertheless, the value created by the analysed railway is a monumental and cultural-technical value, as it has been in service from the time of its construction until the present day.
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