Hanoi’s 124-year-old Long Bien Bridge closes for repairs after metro replacement never came

Hanoi is closing Long Bien Bridge to all motorbikes, bicycles, and pedestrians for 60 days starting March 28, after a structural failure in February forced the city to confront the accelerating deterioration of one of Southeast Asia’s oldest steel bridges.

The Department of Construction said the closure, running until May 27, is needed for emergency repairs to the pedestrian walkways and vehicle lanes on both sides of the bridge. All road traffic is being rerouted to the nearby Chuong Duong Bridge.

Long Bien Bridge broke ground in September 1898 under French colonial rule and was inaugurated in 1902, making it one of the oldest operational steel truss bridges in the region.

Stretching 1,691 meters across the Red River with 19 spans, the bridge still carries dozens of passenger and freight trains daily on the Hanoi-Dong Dang railway line, alongside thousands of motorbikes, bicycles, and pedestrians. Cars were banned years ago.

After 124 years of use and heavy bombing during the American and French wars, only nine spans on the Hanoi side and 3.5 on the Gia Lam side retain their original design. The rest were replaced with mismatched military-style girder spans.

The emergency repairs follow a serious structural scare. On the evening of Feb. 2, Ha Hai Railway JSC, the company managing the bridge, discovered that a steel truss joint between panels 10 and 11 of span 18 had fractured completely, with the connecting plate snapping across its entire cross-section and the upper chord members separating from the truss nodes.

The railway authority immediately sealed off the Hanoi-Gia Lam section, rerouting passenger trains on the Hanoi-Hai Phong line to terminate at Gia Lam Station instead of Hanoi Station. The bridge reopened to trains on the evening of Feb. 9 after emergency reinforcement.

The bridge was never meant to last this long. A comprehensive repair in 2015 costing nearly VND300 billion ($11.4 million) was designed to keep it operational only until 2020, when Metro Line 1 (Yen Vien-Ngoc Hoi) was expected to replace it with a modern river crossing.

That metro line, first approved in 2004, has never broken ground. After more than two decades of delays, the project was recently transferred to the Hanoi city government and is now tentatively slated for the 2030-2035 construction period.

By Vo Hai – VnExpress.net – March 26, 2026