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Andreyevsky Bridge
In 1905-1907, a railway bridge was built across the Moskva River at the 35th kilometre of the small ring of the Moscow Circular Railway. After the assassination in 1905 of the Moscow governor-general, Grand Duke Sergei Alexandrovich, the bridge was named Sergievsky, and in the 1920s it was renamed Andreyevsky after the name of the nearby monastery founded back in the 17th century. The constructive solution of the bridge belonged to the outstanding Russian scientist and engineer L.D. Proskuryakov and engineer P.Ya. Kamentsev, and the architectural one to professor of the Academy of Arts A.N. Pomerantsev, the author of structures of the small railway ring. The most famous work of the architect is the Upper Trade Rows on Red Square (present GUM).
The original design of the Andreyevsky Bridge was an exact copy of the Krasnoluzhsky Bridge, designed by the same architect and built upstream on the 38th kilometre of the Small Railway Ring. The twin bridges connected the banks of the Moscow River at the base of the loop made by the channel around Luzhniki: Andreevsky – from the Neskuchny Garden side, Krasnoluzhsky – from the Bersenevskaya Embankment side.
According to the orders of the Ministry of Railways in 1897-1898, iron, cast iron and steel for bridges and overpasses of the Moscow district railway had to meet the strictest specifications. In the contracts for their manufacture and assembly, it was specified that “all materials for the span structures must be of Russian manufacture without exception, all semi-finished materials must be certified by stamps and invoices of the Russian factories that supplied them, all iron, including rivets, must be cast”. These requirements were strictly observed. All stone for the construction of the bridge was tested for strength and frost resistance.
The overhead part of the Andreyevsky Bridge was a steel arch span of 135 metres in length, 9.8 metres in width and 15 metres in height of the arch. Outside each arch truss at the level of the carriageway there were pavements. The side spans adjoining the bridge on both sides, each 18.44 metres wide, were covered with decorative stone arches. All the four supports, lined with granite blocks, stood on wooden pile foundations. The two bank piers, topped with towers, had metal bypass galleries. In the early twentieth century, they were used by boatmen to conduct ships on the Moskva River.
Over the past ninety-odd years, the Andreyevsky Bridge has been inspected, repaired, rebuilt and repaired many times. However, despite numerous repairs, the bridge’s structure continued to weaken and deteriorate. The speed of trains on the bridge had to be reduced to 40 kilometres per hour in 1998. In addition, the design of the span did not allow for the electrification of the railway line, which also hindered the radical reconstruction of the Small Ring of the Moscow Ring Railway.
The Moscow government decided to preserve this monument of architecture and engineering – the Andreyevsky Bridge: remove it from its supports, move it one and a half kilometres down the river, and put it in a new alignment on new supports. As a result, the old bridge in its new location, covered with a translucent cover, has become a shopping and pedestrian bridge with marble floors and escalators, connecting the Central Park of Culture and the Neskuchny Garden with Frunzenskaya Embankment and Khamovniki, and named Pushkin Bridge.
A road bridge of the Third Ring Road and a new railway bridge, both called the Andreyevsky Bridge, were built in its former place.
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