The caption is in Hungarian and German with no Serbian, which places the card before 1918, and it names only the structure, not the town or the river. A group of Austro-Hungarian soldiers stands posted along the track inside the lattice portal, so the bridge was under guard and the picture belongs to the war years.
About this place
The Emperor Franz Joseph bridge was the first permanent crossing of the Danube at Novi Sad and it carried the railway, not the road. It went up in 1883, the year the line from Subotica reached the town in March and the stretch onward to Zemun opened in December, and it stood for fifty-eight years. After 1918 it was renamed for Prince Andrej of the Yugoslav royal house. The Yugoslav army blew it up in April 1941 to slow the German advance southward, and the occupiers put up a replacement railway bridge that they in turn destroyed as they withdrew in 1944. This archive's catalogue gives the length as 432 metres and credits the design to Karl Baumann, who is said also to have driven the tunnel under the Petrovaradin fortress.
On the card
Vasuti hid / Eisenbahnbruecke
- Date
- 1914–1918
- Coordinates
- 45.24995, 19.85566
- Source
- Public online source
- Licence
- Public domain (historical photograph)
- Size
- 1600 × 1052 px
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