Veresk Bridge: The Engineer Who Stood Beneath His Own Creation
When the first train rolled across the Veresk Bridge in 1936, the story goes that Cesare Delleani - the Italian engineer who had spent two years building it through floods, earthquakes, and mountain terrain - stood with his family directly beneath the 66-meter arch, 110 meters above the valley floor. Whether Reza Shah ordered this demonstration of faith or Delleani volunteered it, the gesture captured something true about this bridge: it was built by people who believed in it enough to stake their lives on the stone and mortar they had placed with their own hands.
A Railway Through the Impossible
The Trans-Iranian Railway was Reza Shah's grand modernization project - a line connecting the Persian Gulf to the Caspian Sea, running straight through the Alborz Mountains. The Danish consortium Kampsax won the contract in 1933, and the northern section's Lot 8 fell to Guido Romeo Pizzagalli, an Italian engineer from Milan. The numbers alone suggest the difficulty: 7,600 meters of track with a height difference of 186 meters, requiring ten tunnels and two major bridges. The larger bridge - the Veresk - would span 112 meters with a masonry arch soaring 60 meters across the gap. Pizzagalli assembled a team of Italian engineers, including the three Delleani brothers from Biella: Battista, Guido, and Cesare. The youngest, Cesare, took charge of the bridge.
Built Through Disaster
Construction began in 1934, and the mountains fought back almost immediately. Two cable-ways ferried workers and materials to the construction site, perched on the walls of the Veresk valley. In July 1934, a flood tore through the valley bottom, killing many workers. On March 5, 1935, a powerful earthquake struck, claiming more lives and damaging the construction site substantially. The workforce was enormous and international: 260 specialized European workers, most of them Italian, alongside roughly 2,700 laborers from across Asia. They pressed on. By December 1935, the bridge and the entire lot were finished. The project was handed over to the contractor by January 1936 - less than eighteen months after the first stone was laid, despite catastrophes that would have halted lesser projects.
The Bridge of Victory
During World War II, the Veresk Bridge acquired a new name: Pol-e Piroozi, the Bridge of Victory. Its strategic importance became clear when Adolf Hitler asked Reza Shah to destroy all tunnels and bridges on Iran's railway lines to prevent Allied supply shipments from reaching the Soviet Union through Iran. Hitler promised to rebuild everything after Germany's victory. Reza Shah refused. The railway - and the Veresk Bridge - remained intact, and the Trans-Iranian corridor became a vital supply route for the Allies, funneling war materiel north to the Soviet front. The bridge that Italian engineers had built through natural disasters now served a purpose its creators could never have imagined.
Memorial in the Mountains
Near the bridge stands a memorial to the construction workers who died building it and its surrounding tunnels - men whose names are largely forgotten but whose labor holds trains aloft to this day. The Austrian engineer Walter Aigner, following his own wishes, is buried in the cemetery at Veresk, choosing to remain forever in the mountains where he worked. Beneath the bridge, a tunnel carries trains through the rock after they cross the span, spiraling downward to lose altitude gradually before reaching the station. The engineering is elegant in its ingenuity: the bridge, the tunnel, and the descent form an integrated system that solved the fundamental problem of getting a railway over mountains that rise thousands of meters in a short horizontal distance.
Still Standing, Still Working
Trains connecting Tehran to Gorgan or Sari cross the Veresk Bridge roughly four times daily. Nearly a century after its construction, the masonry arch still carries rail traffic through the Alborz Mountains - a testament to the quality of the stone, the precision of the engineering, and the skill of Giacomo Di Marco, the master carpenter from Friuli who built the elaborate wooden forms into which the concrete and masonry were placed. The bridge stands 85 kilometers south of Ghaemshahr, connecting two mountainsides in the Abbas Abad region of Mazandaran Province. From below, the arch frames sky and forest. From above, the bridge appears as a thin line drawn across a deep green valley. Either way, it remains one of the masterpieces of the Trans-Iranian Railway, and among the finest bridges Iran has ever built.
From the Air
Located at 35.90°N, 52.99°E in the Alborz Mountains of Mazandaran Province, northern Iran. The bridge spans a deep valley in the Veresk district of Savadkuh County, 85 km south of Ghaemshahr. From the air, look for the railway line threading through narrow mountain valleys with multiple tunnels - the bridge appears as a dramatic arch spanning a forested gorge. Best viewed at lower altitudes in clear conditions. The nearest airports are Sari (OINZ) and Ghaemshahr. The surrounding terrain is steep and heavily forested, typical of the Alborz northern slopes. The Trans-Iranian Railway line is visible as it winds through the mountains.