Post Driveability Study for Caesar's Rhine Bridge 55 B.C

As the story goes, in the early summer of 55 BC the Roman general Julius Caesar had a 400 m long bridge
built over the Rhine within just 10 days and then demolished again after a few days. According to Caesar,
the bridge was built to be able to carry out a punitive expedition against the Germans on the right bank of
the Rhine. The bridge was undoubtedly a beam or yoke bridge. The distances between the yokes were at
most 12 m, so that a total of 30 - 35 yokes were required. The piles consisted of tree trunks pointed at the
bottom, most likely without the iron pile shoes that were otherwise common among the Romans. The piles
were driven into the riverbed with specially designed pile drivers, which means that there must have been
experience with taking pile driving conditions into account and understanding of those conditions at the
job site. Nowadays a pile driveability study would have been part of the bridge design process. The authors
took up the challenge to perform a post driveability study for this bridge based on the limited data
available and the results are presented in this paper. The predictions were performed with the wave
equation program AllWave-PDP.