Museum of Bridges in Saint Petersburg

The importance of bridges in Saint Petersburg is hard to overestimate — they served as crossings over the Neva and the capital's canals, marked milestones in the city's development, and inscribed the names of bridge engineers into history. The Museum of Bridges' collection includes models of pedestrian, road and railway bridges that reflected technological progress and met the needs of Imperial, Soviet and modern Russia. For example, in the 18th century crossing bridges was subject to a toll: pedestrians were charged one kopeck, riders two kopecks, and those in carriages five kopecks.

The Museum of Bridges opened in Saint Petersburg in 2019 and, in essence, is a branch of the Central Museum of Railway Transport of the Russian Federation. Most of the bridges presented in the museum are part of the world's cultural heritage. The exhibition includes more than twenty models of Petersburg bridges: many of them have not survived to the present day, and can only be judged by rare models, some of which are over two hundred years old. The models were created jointly by engineers and jewelers and were made in strict proportions of bridge structures, most often at a scale of 1:42.

In the museum foyer, in addition to the ticket office and souvenir shop, visitors are greeted by the control console of a drawbridge that was in operation throughout the second half of the 20th century. In the 21st century, due to reconstruction of the draw mechanism, it was donated to the museum. The museum has four halls in total, where you can trace the history of bridge construction from the 18th century to the present day. The exhibition includes models of the Egyptian and Panteleimon Bridges, the Nikolaevsky (Blagoveshchensky) Bridge with a retractable draw span, a 190-year-old bridge on stone columns built across the mouth of the Staroladozhsky Canal, the Yamsky bridge-aqueduct, the Bolshoy Konyushenny Bridge, and the "youngest" fixed cable-stayed Betancourt Bridge, opened in 2018.

Betancourt Bridge. Photo: mostotrest-spb.ru

Part of the exhibition is devoted to the personalities of bridge builders and tells about the author of the first drawbridge across the Neva — Stanislav Valeryevich Kerbedz; the author of the hymn "God Save the Tsar" and engineer Aleksey Lvov; Dmitry Ivanovich Zhuravsky, who built 183 crossings on the Moscow–Saint Petersburg road; and the Spanish engineer Agustín de Betancourt, who invented an underwater saw for cutting construction bridge piles. The museum recently reopened after a reexhibition, so it is a must-visit for anyone interested in the history of Saint Petersburg and bridge construction. For full immersion, we recommend booking a guided tour.

---