December 9, 2005
The Sunniberg Bridge near eastern Switzerland’s Alpine village of Klosters was officially opened to vehicular traffic nine years after its completion. (“Sunniberg” means “sunny mountain” in German.) This curved multi-span extradosed bridge – a structure that blends the main components of both a cable-stayed bridge and a prestressed box girder bridge – carries Klosters bypass road 28 across the Landquart River.
Internationally renowned Swiss civil engineer Christian Menn took the lead in designing the Sunniberg Bridge. Construction on the bridge began during the spring of 1996. It was completed ahead of schedule in the fall of 1998. The public debut of the Sunniberg Bridge, however, was postponed until work on the Gotschna Tunnel had been finished. That tunnel is linked to the southern end of the bridge.
The Sunniberg Bridge was formally inaugurated by Charles, Prince of Wales, who would assume the British throne as King Charles III in 2022. Several Swiss public officials joined Charles, a frequent visitor to Klosters, for the dedication ceremony. These public officials included Mortiz Leuenberger, who was serving at the time as head of Switzerland’s Federal Department of Environment, Transport, Energy and Communications.
In 2001, the 1,726-foot (526-meter)-long Sunniberg Bridge was given the Outstanding Structure Award by the International Association for Bridge and Structural Engineering (IABSE) for serving as “a delicate expression of structural art responding to a sensitive landscape.” (The accompanying photo of the bridge was taken in 2006.)
Photo Credit: Ikiwaner (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Ikiwaner) – licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license at https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en
For more information on the Sunniberg Bridge, please check out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunniberg_Bridge
Transportation History 