Friendship Bridge

One of the attractions of Termez is the famous Friendship Bridge, the only one on the southern border of Uzbekistan with Afghanistan, which connects Termez with the Afghan port city of Hairaton.

More than a century ago, the wooden and then the iron Amudarya Bridge stood on the site of the Friendship Bridge. The first wooden bridge was built under the leadership of General of the Russian Tsarist Army M. Annenkov in May 1888, when Russia was just beginning to explore Central Asia. At that time, the Transcaspian railway was under construction and the crossing of the Amu Darya was necessary.

The Amudarya railway bridge was reinforced on wooden piles, and its length was almost three kilometers. It has been called the largest engineering achievement of that time. Alas, the bridge lasted only 14 years: due to the rapid flow of the river and the sandy bottom, the bridge began to collapse and quickly became unusable.

At the beginning of the XX century. The Transcaspian railway was renamed the Central Asian Railway, since it now covered the whole of Turkestan. And the load on the Amu Darya Bridge has become so significant that its urgent modernization was required.

The construction of a new, now iron, ferry began in 1902. The Russian state allocated 5 million rubles for the bridge, which was a lot of money at that time. The construction was led by the outstanding engineer S. Olshevsky, who already had experience in the construction of large bridge structures on the West Siberian, Aral and other railways. He constructed a sturdy 27-span railway bridge on the rebellious Amu Darya River, which became one of the largest in the world at that time. The bridge was well done. Maybe that's why the next "upgrade" of the building took place only 77 years later, already in Soviet times.

The current 816-meter-long railway and automobile bridge was built in 1981 by Soviet builders at the height of the Afghan War. That year, the partial withdrawal of Soviet troops from Afghanistan began, and the new bridge was symbolically named the Bridge of Friendship, as a sign of hope for an early end to the war and the establishment of friendly relations between the states. In 1989, it was according to him that the withdrawal of Soviet troops from Afghanistan was solemnly completed.

After the end of the war in Afghanistan, in the late 90s, the Taliban captured the northern provinces of Afghanistan, and the Friendship Bridge was renamed Hairaton. The bridge was closed for security reasons. Traffic on it was resumed only in 2001. The grand opening of the bridge was marked by the dispatch of 16 wagons with humanitarian aid, and the bridge was renamed the Friendship Bridge again. Currently, the bridge is operational and freight and automobile transportation are carried out on it.