Organisation Todt Railway Bridge

The Organisation Todt railway in Jersey was inaugurated on 15 July 1942, with much pomp and ceremony. The event, with its solemn speeches and the cutting of a symbolic tape to allow a decorated locomotive to proceed, was regarded as ‘one of the greatest jokes of the Occupation’ (Leslie Sinel ‘Occupation Diary’), given that Jersey’s own railways had closed down just six years earlier. 

The German metre gauge railway ran north from Pont Marquet, St Brelade, to the Ronez Quarry on the north coast, in the Parish of St John. In order to carry building materials and supplies to and from the west coast, a mixed 60cm and metre gauge branch line ran from St Peter’s to St Ouen’s Bay, then continued north to the quarries at L’Etacq and south to the quarry at La Pulente. 

In order to cross over La Route de Moulin near to the Bethesda Methodist Chapel, St Ouen, a concrete overbridge was built with a width of 17 feet and height of 14 feet. A sand embankment was built to compensate for the steep decline, but has since been removed. 

Although the line wasn’t used regularly, ‘on one Sunday the entire congregation of Bethesda Chapel witnessed a steam engine passing over the bridge and vanishing up the valley [Val de la Mare].’ (R Bonsor, ‘The Jersey Eastern Railway and the German Occupation Lines’). 

The narrow gauge branch line which crossed the bridge had been abandoned by September 1943, when the fortification programme began to wind down.