Talk:Garabit viaduct

Location and near.

I put the location of the bridge in the article but where it's near is still there but it looks a little out of place. Maybe someone knows how to fix it. --Northernwolves 19:46, 8 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Capacity

How much weight can the viaduct hold?? Does anybody know the answer?

I remember reading that the load tests were done with a 75 ton locomotive and 15 ton rail cars, however I don't have a citation. Perhaps you can find the details and add it to the article. —RandallJones 19:50, 14 February 2006 (UTC)

Vandalism

• I am sorry to see that the vandalism of 64.251.48.164 had been identified, but not reverted. It took me some time to realize that the last valid version was six or seven iterations old... Hektor 19:25, 6 May 2006 (UTC)

Catenary or Parabola???

Several captions for the photo of this bridge in other articles refer to it as a catenary, not a parabola. I could not find any reference to this bridge being a catenary in this article, however. It does not make sense that this bridge would be a catenary, because it bears weight other than simply the arch form, for which a parabola is a stronger shape. Are these other captions incorrect? Or is this bridge just some kind of freak? Cajolingwilhelm 05:58, 7 March 2007 (UTC)

A very good question. I was wondering the same myself. —bse3 (talk • contribs • count • logs) 20:27, 3 October 2008 (UTC)

It is a parabola. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 77.58.147.83 (talk) 20:08, 29 April 2009 (UTC)

Revision

The article seems to have been written by a person with a limited command of idiomatic English. It is possibly a translation by a non-native speaker. Revision/rewriting is necessary. Everybody got to be somewhere! (talk) 14:55, 1 November 2010 (UTC)

Unsourced material

Article has been tagged for needing sources long-term. Feel free to reinsert the below material with appropriate references. DonIago (talk) 13:11, 9 September 2014 (UTC)

Bridge design and construction

The project was demanding, with a line 120 metres (400 ft) over the River Truyère. Boyer believed this would be considerably less expensive than taking the railway line around or down through the valley. To resist the wind, Eiffel instantly discarded the principle of solid beam construction, thinking that “it would be very heavy and the beams would rattle in the wind”. Instead, he adopted the concept of trusses or “a series of open triangles” to assuage wind force that “would blow right through them”. Truss work also provides stability when loads are applied through the theory of tension and compression that states force is exerted on the diagonal and vertical segments causing them to resist one another. Eiffel also improved upon his Douro design, adopting the same two-hinged crescent-arch form but employing an arch visually separated from the thin horizontal girder. The Garabit Viaduct’s arches were engineered to have support hinges, allowing the crescent shape to widen. This method both simplified calculations and improved resistance to wind loads.

Is it in use or not?

The text is ambiguous. It says services stopped on a certain day, which begs the question of whether they stopped permanently from that date or temporarily? Is the bridge currently used? --Dweller (talk) 14:07, 17 September 2014 (UTC)

IIRC there was a line indicating that the bridge had been reopened, but there was no source provided, and given that the article's been tagged for that problem since 2012... DonIago (talk) 14:45, 17 September 2014 (UTC)

It's in use. It was closed for a while in 2009 and subsequently operated with a reduced speed limit. I've seen a train crossing it more recently. French railways (SNCF) website will sell you a ticket with no need to change from Béziers to Neussargues if you search for reservations. However, how you make that a valid reference I'm not sure. See also, if you read French, the Viaduc de Garabit article on the French Wikipedia. Emeraude (talk) 08:20, 21 September 2014 (UTC)

HighestBridges.com

I have removed the reference to HighestBridges.com because it may actually be referencing back to Wikipedia. As it says on the site: "Some portions © WikiMedia Foundation (Templates from Wikipedia) - Please refer to Wikipedia and MediaWiki sites for more information on copyright of these works." It does seem to have been factually correct, however.--ServeDotty (talk) 10:56, 17 November 2020 (UTC)

Was Eiffel indeed the architect? See common confusion with Eiffel Tower.

The Eiffel Tower was not, and hardly anyone would know that unless they read up carefully. Arminden (talk) 11:53, 21 September 2021 (UTC)