enabled the passage of larger riverboats up to Sarreguemines past the otherwise non-navigable canal of the river Saar in this area. However, the bridge was not given the name "Friendship Bridge" ( ) until 1968. Bridge of 1993 Given its old age, further maintenance and repair of the bridge soon turned out to be uneconomic. Laid-out as a pedestrian bridge, the Friendship Bridge only carried an urban importance initially. The necessity to facilitate the border-crossing of goods and passenger trafficking in this spot was already seen in the 1970s, as all suitable border crossings for motor traffic to France at Rilchingen-Hanweiler and Saarbrücken-Güdingen were too far away and would have required cross-town links. The solution was a road bridge (), which was built at the beginning of the 1980s, connecting the B-51 with the Route nationale 61 (or respectively the Départementale 31) connecting the distributor road to the autobahn Saarbrücken-Paris () near Forbach - which parallels the B-51 on the west bank. It crosses the river Saar only a few kilometers south of Auersmacher (a district of Kleinblittersdorf). Additionally, the recently finished building project Bypass B-51 of the Kleinblittersdorf municipality crossing under the old bridge required a larger overhead clearance. These were the frame conditions for the necessary replacement construction of the pedestrian connection of both town centres. The construction works started at the end of 1992 and the inauguration followed on September 12, 1993, by the respective mayors, Günther Brettar (Kleinblittersdorf) and Jean Jung (Grosbliederstroff), as well as the environment minister of the Saarland region, Jo Leinen. The old bridge, which was only a few meters away, was not removed until after this event because it allowed around 800 pedestrians to cross over every day during the construction work. The new three-bay bridge has a width of 3.5 m, a length of 140.2 m and consists of a river bridge and an outland bridge. The river bridge features open spans ranging between 58.8 m and 65.9 m. It has a haunched steel composite construction with a box girder cross section, whose overall height varies between 1.5 m at the abutment and 3.5 m over the river piers. The outland bridge has a span of 14.2 m and a reinforced concrete superstructure. The building costs added up to 4 million DM ("German marks"). The offices responsible for the architectural planning were Andree from Dillingen and Dincher from Saarbrücken, whereas the