As an ant, tunnels are naturally more my thing – not bridges. But somehow I have always been very fond of bridges. That's why I'm particularly pleased that we've just finished building one: the BW C06 A15, which is made of 961 cubic metres of concrete and 164 tons of steel. It takes the B96a across the future eastern section of the mainline railway.

I must have started singing its praises to the skies at our family party over the weekend because by the time I had finished my account of the history of bridge building, which began with stones, wooden planks and fallen trees that served as narrow bridges over short distances and went on to antiquity and the arch bridges of Ancient Greece and ended with the masterpieces of modern engineering at our BBI site, everyone had fallen suspiciously quiet. My two-year-old nephew broke the silence drily with the question, “Uncle Armin, what is a bridge?” Everyone laughed, but I went a bit overboard on the answer.

“All structures of one transport route over another transport route, over a body of water or lower-lying terrain are defined as bridges if the clearance between their abutments is 2 metres or more (...)” according to the German industrial standard DIN 1076.

A totally unsuitable explanation for a nephew with a dummy in his mouth! Well, anyway, then I explained to him that our bridge is a roadway nine metres high and 40 metres long beneath which the railway will later crawl. Of course, he wanted to see it for himself then and there. Luckily, that was no problem because it's the first structure on the BBI site that's already in operation! So we drove out there straight away.

Wersja drukowana berlin-airport.de (Copyright Berliner Flughäfen)