Most Podgórzanek, Kraków

Most Podgórzanek is a pedestrian and cycle crossing alongside Kraków’s central railway bridge over the Vistula. Opened in 2023 and named in 2025, it sits beside a rail crossing with a history reaching back to an Austrian wooden bridge of 1856. Today’s rebuilt complex includes three railway bridges and large arch spans.

Most Podgórzanek is the pedestrian-and-cycle crossing built as part of Kraków’s railway bridge over the Vistula. The crossing received its present name on the third of July 2025. Beside it, trains run between Kraków Grzegórzki and Kraków Zabłocie on the city’s central rail route, including lines that continue toward Medyka and Kraków Bieżanów.

This river crossing has repeatedly been remade. Austrian railway builders first put up a wooden bridge here in 1856, on the route from Kraków to Dębica, which opened that February and later stretched east through Rzeszów, Przemyśl and Lviv. In 1864, the timber structure gave way to a permanent, five-span steel bridge carrying two tracks; its metalwork was renewed twenty years later.

In January 1945, withdrawing German troops blew up the bridge, as they did Kraków’s other bridges. Soviet forces rebuilt it within the same year. The newest work finished in 2023: three railway bridges now span the Vistula here, with a double-track bridge, two single-track bridges, and three sweeping arch spans.

The longest arch reaches 116 metres across and 18 metres high. This pedestrian-and-cycle link opened on the tenth of June 2023.