ECI – Engineers Construction

ECI is the recipient of the 2017 AGC-VT Best Builder Award in the category of Intermodal Transportation & Rail for the Pittsford Bridge Rehabilitation & Strengthening Project.

Bridge #219 is a two-span Vermont Railway Systems (VRS) railroad bridge over the Otter Creek in Florence (Town of Pittsford), VT.  The bridge was constructed in 1900 and originally consisted of a 133-ft-long truss span and a 73-ft-long girder span with stone abutments and middle pier within the river.  The center pier, which is on a 22-degree skew, had experienced settlement and deterioration throughout the years and required periodic heavy maintenance and shimming of the bridge and tracks to maintain adequate track alignment.  This projected involved replacing the center pier with a new concrete pier cap supported by drilled shafts on each side of the existing stone pier.  Only two weekend-long railroad shutdowns were allowed and therefore a majority of the work was to be completed under normal rail traffic. This bridge is along the VTR’s busiest section of track.  Engineers Construction, Inc. (ECI) completed the challenge by segmenting the new pier cap into 3-sections, with a 200,000-pound center precast section that was installed (temporarily) on top of the partially-demolished stone pier during one of the weekend-long shutdowns.  This required unloading of the center pier with temporary shoring of the truss span and complete removal of the 73-ft long girder span by crane lift.  The precast section of the new pier cap, which included new bearings and bearing pedestals, was designed to be temporarily supported on the remaining section of the existing center stone pier. The new precast section was later integrated with the adjacent 6-foot diameter drilled shafts with cast-in-place  infills placed after the shutdown.