Ferries had connected Korsør and Nyborg since 1883, carrying the railway across the water that splits Denmark in half. Proposals for something permanent appeared as early as the 1850s. The Danish State Railways drew up bridge plans in 1934, and by around 1936 someone had put a price on it: 257 million kroner for Storebælt, 152 million for the Øresund. In 1948 the Ministry for Public Works appointed a commission to study the implications. A first law passed in 1973, then stalled in 1978 when the Venstre party insisted on postponing public spending. Political agreement to restart came in 1986, a construction law followed in 1987, and work finally began in 1988 - a hundred and thirty-eight years after the first sketch. Road ferries, meanwhile, had shifted in 1957 to the Halsskov–Knudshoved route, about 1.5 kilometres north of where the link would eventually run.

The East Bridge was meant to be the longest suspension bridge in the world. Built between 1991 and 1998 at a cost of around 950 million US dollars, it runs 6,790 metres from Halsskov to the island of Sprogø, with a free span of 1,624 metres. Construction ran late. Japan's Akashi Kaikyō Bridge, at 1,991 metres, opened two months earlier and took the record. The Danish span remains among the ten longest in the world, though newer bridges in China and Turkey have pushed it down the list; the current record belongs to the 1915 Çanakkale Bridge, 2,023 metres, opened in 2022. What the East Bridge did keep is the Danish altitude record. Its two pylons rise 254 metres above the sea, the highest points on any self-supporting structure in the country. Beneath the deck there are 65 metres of clearance - enough that an Oasis-class cruise ship passes underneath with its smokestack folded down.

Trains do not cross the East Bridge. They go under it, through twin bored tubes 8,024 metres long each, and that half of the project nearly broke. During boring the sea bed gave way and water poured in, flooding a tunnel and damaging the machines; both tubes took water before crews sealed the ground with a clay blanket and dried them out. Workers in the pressurised sections paid a physical price too. Decompression sickness occurred at a rate of 0.14 percent, and two men were left with long-term symptoms. The West Bridge, running 6,611 metres from Sprogø to Knudshoved on Funen, was the comparatively straightforward part: a box-girder structure carrying road and rail side by side, sixty-three deck sections on sixty-two pillars, built between 1988 and 1994.

The link became the largest construction project in Danish history, and it was costed accordingly - 21.4 billion kroner at 1988 prices, roughly 2.8 billion euros. The human ledger is shorter and harder. Four hundred and seventy-nine work-related accidents were reported during construction. Fifty-three of them caused serious injury or death, and seven workers were killed. The maintenance bill has kept its own surprises. Fifteen years after opening, the main cables showed no rust and were due a 15-million-kroner repaint. Corrosion found inside the cables of other suspension bridges changed the calculation, and Denmark spent 70 million instead on a sealed dehumidifying system to keep the steel dry from within.

Rail traffic started crossing in 1997, road traffic on 14 June 1998. A journey that took an hour by ferry now takes ten minutes, and the demand that appeared afterwards was not merely transferred - traffic across the strait rose 127 percent in the first year, the so-called traffic leap. By 2021 an average of 34,100 vehicles used the link daily, and on 7 August 2022 a record 61,528 crossed in twenty-four hours. Ships have hit it twice. The ferry Romsø drifted into the West Bridge in bad weather on 14 September 1993, while the link was still unfinished, and on 3 March 2005 the 3,500-tonne freighter Karen Danielsen struck it 800 metres from the Funen shore; inspectors found no structural damage and the bridge reopened after midnight. Seven wind turbines went up in the sea north of Sprogø in 2009, their hubs at roughly the height of the motorway deck, generating power for the crossing they stand beside.