EN
The article focuses on the history, state of preservation and postulates calling for the conservation protection of the historical parabolic viaduct of the Warsaw-Kalisz Railway (with a diameter of 3,00 fathoms). In 1904 this small-scale engineering undertaking was realised, together with building a railway line on an embankment towards the Kalisz steel viaduct, along which it ran above the tracks of the Warsaw-Vienna railway station (today: the PKP Warszawa Zachodnia station). The fundamental objective of the viaduct was to ensure access from Armatnia Street (which adjoined a housing estate for workers of the Kalisz line) towards reloading facilities situated between a temporary wide-gauge track station of the Warsaw-Kalisz Rail and a group of the normal-gauge reloading tracks of the Warsaw- Vienna Rail station. At the time, the viaduct construction was highly innovative and featured a reinforced concrete vault (the first such construction in Warsaw was the road viaduct in Karowa Street from 1904). After during the First World War the Prussian troops granted the Warsaw Rail Junction lines a normal width of 1435 mm, the complicated by-pass of theWarszawa Rozrządowa station lost its raison d’etre. The steel viaduct, together with the detour tracks, were probably dismantled during the interwar redesigning of theWarszawa Zachodnia station, conducted at the time of the modernisation of the Warsaw Rail Junction. At this time, the whole embankment was levelled, with the exception of small fragments on both sides of the viaduct, which was not pulled down probably due to the time- -consuming nature of such a task. In this way, the building became a fragment of the communication sequence of Armatnia Street. The preserved viaduct is in a relatively satisfactory technical condition, although its retaining walls are slightly damaged. It also lacks fragments of their facing, and the bricks and reinforced concrete vaults display bullet traces. The extant components include both, probably original, riveted barriers as well as the pintle hinges of the viaduct construction elements, which originally supported both wings of the wooden gate. Owing to the fact that the Warsaw–Kalisz Rail viaduct in Armatnia Street is a valuable monument of early twentieth-century civil engineering, probably one of the two oldest reinforced concrete buildings in Warsaw and, simultaneously, a relic of a non-existent railway line, it deserves to be ensured conservation protection by including it onto a list of historical monuments as an element of the preserved spatial configuration of a housing estate for the employees of the Warsaw-Kalisz Rail (this area includes four preserved residential houses belonging to the same rail line, all of considerable historical value). The viaduct is one of the three extant civil engineering edifices of this type within the administrative limits of the city of Warsaw.