Loading tests on an historic railway arch bridge. After 150 years in use the historic masonry arch bridge over the river Aller near Verden was taken out of service in October 2015 and was demolished in summer 2016. The time gap between decommission and demolition offered the ordinary chance for an experimental investigation of the load-deformation behavior of the arch-row by load testing. A project team under the leadership of the Institute of Concrete Construction of the Leibniz University Hannover has carried out two load test with a maximum load of 570 t () in March and June 2016. With the load tests the influence of the front wall and the sealing layer on the bearing behavior could be detected and also quantified with a great number of local and global deformation measurements. The experimental results are the basis for an improvement of the calculation methods and models to be able to evaluate the bearing safety of existing arch bridges more realistically.