Introduction

Budapest, the Hungarian capital has eight older bridges over the Danube, which are results of development of a one-hundred-year-long period. The first of them is the well-known Chain Bridge, which was constructed in the middle of the 19th century, while the last one was the Árpád Bridge, which was opened for traffic after the World War II.

They are quite different in appearance and in structural system, some of them have special architectural importance, but there are two things, which are common for all of them, namely
(i) their material is steel,
(ii) all of the existing bridges were destroyed during 1945.

The series of reconstruction was started by the construction of a "new" bridge, of the Kossuth bridge, which was built from the remains of existing bridges; and it was finished by the opening of the new Elisabeth bridge in 1964.

After that, for a rather long period, there were no new Danube bridge constructions in Budapest, while in 1990 the new M0 motorway bridge on the south boundary of the capital, and in 1995 the "Lágymányosi" bridge, just on the north side of the Southern railway bridge, was opened for traffic.

Nowadays most of the bridges of Budapest are so old, that their maintenance, repair and reconstruction is a regular task for the management of the city.

The Department of Steel Structures, Technical University of Budapest is taking part in this activity. These pages is giving a summary of the historical and technical data of the bridges and contains information about the checks, which have been carried out in the last decades.

These pages are giving an overview about the Danube bridges in Budapest in different respects.
For all bridges, existing in this area in the last one hundred fifty years, they are summarising the most important technical information and historical interests.
A general sketch is also given about the activity of the Department of Steel Structures at the Technical University of Budapest, in their realisation and reconstruction work.
More details are available in the general references.

General references

• International Conference "Bridges on the Danube", Vienna-Bratislava-Budapest, 7-12 September 1992, Proceedings, Vol. 1-2. (Ed.: Chladny, E. - Iványi, M. - Ramberger, G. - Stipanic, B.)
• International Conference "Bridges on the Danube", Vienna-Bratislava-Budapest, 7-12 September 1992, Final Report (Ed.: Iványi, M. - Hegedűs, L.)
• "Bridges on the Danube" Catalogue, 1992, Prepared for the International Conference "Bridges on the Danube", Vienna-Bratislava-Budapest, 7-12 September 1992 (Ed.-in-chief: Iványi, M.)
• "US-Hungarian Bridge Conference", Proceedings, Technical University of Budapest, 13 June 1994, (Ed.: Tassi, G.)
• "Bridges on the Danube" Catalogue, 1995, Re-edited for the Second International Conference "Bridges over the Danube", Bucharest, 11-15 September 1995 (Ed.-in-chief: Iványi, M.)