Bridges

In the early days, bridge construction was manual, mainly using woodwork. Bridges were already being built in Estonia during ancient times. Limestone was introduced as a new material during the Middle Ages. The oldest surviving arched stone bridges in Estonia date back to the late 18th century.

At the beginning of the 20th century, reinforced concrete was introduced as a new bridge construction material. Building with this new material was expensive, highly labour-intensive, and required special skills. Therefore, most new bridges in the 1920s continued to be made of wood.

The era of reinforced concrete bridges began in Estonia in the 1930s. By then, the necessary engineering expertise had been developed, and a range of technical tools had been adopted. The construction of bridge piers, which depended largely on the geology of the riverbed, proved to be a particular challenge. For larger bridges, a common approach was to build the pillars on dry ground and later divert water through the artificially created riverbed. This, however, required very large volumes of excavation work, leading to the use of excavators, scrapers, and crawler tractors.

In the post-war period, prefabricated reinforced concrete began to be used in bridge construction, meaning the necessary bridge elements were cast in advance and assembled on site. This was done using mechanised equipment - crawler tractors and mobile cranes.

In the 1950s and 1960s, the number of road bridges decreased significantly as smaller bridges were replaced with culverts. A culvert is a structure located in the road embankment with a diameter of less than 3 meters. Up until the 20th century, culverts were laid as stone vaults or wooden gutters in embankments. Reinforced concrete culverts have been installed since the 1920s. In recent decades, metal and plastic pipes have been used for culverts in Estonian roads. The construction of pipe culverts began in our roads in the early 2000s.