The Weihe Viaduct is a bridge

Bridge

A bridge is a structure built to span physical obstacles such as a body of water, valley, or road, for the purpose of providing passage over the obstacle...

 of the A 4 motorway near Richelsdorf, Germany

Germany

Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a federal parliamentary republic in Europe. The country consists of 16 states while the capital and largest city is Berlin. Germany covers an area of 357,021 km2 and has a largely temperate seasonal climate...

. It is located in the stretch of the A 4 between Bad Hersfeld

Bad Hersfeld

The festival and spa town of Bad Hersfeld is the district seat of Hersfeld-Rotenburg district in northeastern Hesse, Germany, roughly 50 km southeast of Kassel....

 (Hesse

Hesse

Hesse or Hessia is both a cultural region of Germany and the name of an individual German state.* The cultural region of Hesse includes both the State of Hesse and the area known as Rhenish Hesse in the neighbouring Rhineland-Palatinate state...

) and Eisenach

Eisenach

Eisenach is a city in Thuringia, Germany. It is situated between the northern foothills of the Thuringian Forest and the Hainich National Park. Its population in 2006 was 43,626.-History:...

 (Thuringia

Thuringia

The Free State of Thuringia is a state of Germany, located in the central part of the country.It has an area of and 2.29 million inhabitants, making it the sixth smallest by area and the fifth smallest by population of Germany's sixteen states....

), between the exits Wildeck

Wildeck

Wildeck is a community in Hersfeld-Rotenburg district in northeastern Hesse, Germany lying right at the boundary with Thuringia, 54 km southeast of Kassel.- Location :...

-Obersuhl and Gerstungen

Gerstungen

Gerstungen is a municipality in the Wartburgkreis district of Thuringia, Germany.-History:Between 1945 and 1990 Gerstungen served as East German inner German border crossing on the Thuringian Railway...

. It crosses the valley of the small river Weihe.

The bridge was intended to have been built at the beginning of the 1940s, but it wasn't finished then: only a few columns were built. Instead for the motorway a provisional route through the valley was constructed. In the 50 years to follow its construction was cancelled due to its location near the former border between the German Democratic Republic

German Democratic Republic

The German Democratic Republic , informally called East Germany by West Germany and other countries, was a socialist state established in 1949 in the Soviet zone of occupied Germany, including East Berlin of the Allied-occupied capital city...

 and the Federal Republic of Germany

West Germany

West Germany is the common English, but not official, name for the Federal Republic of Germany or FRG in the period between its creation in May 1949 to German reunification on 3 October 1990....

. After the 1990 German reunification

German reunification

German reunification was the process in 1990 in which the German Democratic Republic joined the Federal Republic of Germany , and when Berlin reunited into a single city, as provided by its then Grundgesetz constitution Article 23. The start of this process is commonly referred by Germans as die...

, traffic increased considerably, and in 1992 construction of a new bridge was started. One of the old columns was kept as a monument. The new bridge (45 million DM construction costs) was inaugurated in 1994. It is a prestressed concrete bridge of 584 m, which rest on 8 columns.