Qualla: Paton Bridge

Paton Bridge: Introduction

Mon, 13 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Tiia Monto, CC BY-SA 3.0. The engineer did not live to cross his own bridge. Evgeny Paton had spent his final years arguing for a heretical idea, that a great steel bridge could be held together not by hundreds of thousands of rivets but by welded seams alone, a technique his fellow engineers thought reckless for something so large. He won the argument, saw the work through two wars and a decade of setbacks, and then died on the twelfth of August 1953. Twelve weeks later, on the fifth of November, traffic first rolled across the 1,543-meter span over the Dnipro that would forever bear his name. It remains the longest bridge in Kyiv, and one of the first all-welded bridges the world ever built.

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Image: Tiia Monto | CC BY-SA 3.0

Paton Bridge: The Idea No One Believed

Mon, 13 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Maksym Kozlenko, CC BY-SA 4.0. In the 1930s, welding an entire road bridge was close to unthinkable. The first such structure, Poland's Maurzyce Bridge, had opened only in 1928, and barely a couple dozen welded bridges existed anywhere before the Second World War. Paton, who had founded an electric welding ins...

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Image: Maksym Kozlenko | CC BY-SA 4.0

Paton Bridge: Built Twice

Mon, 13 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Віктор Полянко, CC BY-SA 4.0. Within weeks, war swept it all away. The German invasion halted construction almost as soon as it began, and Kyiv fell under occupation. When the Red Army retook the city on the sixth of November 1943, they found that the retreating German forces had blown up every existing piece...

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Image: Віктор Полянко | CC BY-SA 4.0

Paton Bridge: Stronger Than They Knew

Mon, 13 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Роман Наумов, CC BY-SA 4.0. The bridge kept surprising the people who built it. Designed to carry ten thousand vehicles a day, it was put to a strength test in 1976 that suggested it could bear seven times that, as many as seventy thousand. Streetcar tracks laid across it let Kyivans ride the tram between t...

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Image: Роман Наумов | CC BY-SA 4.0

Paton Bridge: The Working River-Crosser

Mon, 13 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Віктор Полянко, CC BY-SA 4.0. Time has worn the bridge as time wears everything. The streetcar tracks came out in 2004 to make room for more traffic lanes, and a reversible center lane, meant to ease the choking rush-hour jams, brought a grim side effect in the form of head-on collisions. Engineers have long ...

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Image: Віктор Полянко | CC BY-SA 4.0