Sur les routes de France les ponts renaissent


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  • Other title(s): On the roads of France the bridges are reborn
  • Genre: Documentary film
  • Year: 1945
  • Runtime: 00:25:00
  • Description: At the end of the war, many bridges have been destroyed and many cities are isolated. Shipyards start everywhere in France. The main issues are the lack of manpower and of materials. Rebuilders have to deploy treasure of imagination to reconstruct the destroyed bridges.
    A few months after the end of the Second World War, a sad fact emerged: 5,944 passages were cut, i.e. more than 110 km of breaches; many towns were isolated. Construction sites were busy throughout France to "win the battle of road communications". But in addition to the shortage of manpower, there was also a lack of materials (concrete, metal) and therefore a great deal of imagination was required to rebuild the destroyed bridges. If the knowledge of the stone masons was exploited, the most spectacular work was the lifting of bridges, such as the Galliéni bridge in Lyon, where 7 to 800 tons of steel were lifted out of the water with the means of the time. In April 1945, there were 5,700 bridges to be rebuilt, i.e. 200,000 tons of steel, 600,000 tons of cement, 250,000 m3 of wood, 10 million days of work, the price of the reconstruction effort. (Text machine-translated)
  • Keywords: war destruction / construction worker / dispersed groups / prisoner of war / bridge / construction work / river / construction crane / infrastructure / infrastructures-ouvrages d'art / chantier / pont / Reconstruction / restauration / béton précontraint / ministère des travaux publics et des transports / Lyon / Tournon / Caen / France / VICTOR-E project
  • Provider: Ministère de la Reconstruction et de l'Urbanisme
  • Rights: In Copyright / Ministère de la Reconstruction et de l'Urbanisme
  • Production company: Ministère des Travaux Publics et des Transports
  • Colour: Black & White
  • Sound: With sound
  • Language: fr