Rail Baltica’s longest railway bridge to be built by Italian company
Lithuanian infrastructure manager LTG Infra has signed a contract with the Italian company Rizzani de Eccher for the construction of a railway bridge over the river Neris near Jonava. Part of the new Rail Baltica railway, it will be the longest railway bridge in the three Baltic states.
The estimated duration of the Neris bridge works is 2.5 years. With a length of 1,510 metres, the new railway bridge will be the longest in Lithuania as well as the other Baltic states Latvia and Estonia.
The bridge is also important for the construction of other parts of Rail Baltica, namely to carry construction materials for the railway towards the Latvian border, says LTG Infra. “No less than 50-meter-long rails will be transported across the bridge, which can only be carried by rail”, says Karolis Sankovski, CEO of LTG Infra.
Rail Baltica will be an electrified double-track European gauge railway line along the entire Rail Baltica route, connecting Warsaw, Kaunas, Riga, and Tallinn. The total length of Rail Baltica in the Baltic States is 870 kilometres, with 392 kilometres in Lithuania.
Italian constructor
Italian contractor Rizzani de Eccher will build the bridge as well as the nearby infrastructure, the construction contract having a total value of with a value of 64 million euros. The drainage system, electricity, telecommunications, water supply networks will also be reconstructed. In addition, a nearby district road will be repaired by building an intersection leg, and the landscape will be managed by the company.
Rizzani de Eccher has also carried out complex projects in the USA, Canada, Russia, the United Kingdom, Turkey, Central America, Asia, and Africa. Technical maintenance services for the construction of the Rail Baltica railway bridge over Neris near Jonava will be provided by Viamatika, which won the tender announced by LTG Infra last year.
Crossing the river
The bridge will cross a nature reserve part of the European ecological network Natura 2000, which is why particular attention it to be paid to environmental protection. In order to reduce the impact on the biodiversity of the river Neris, work in the protected area will not be carried out during fish migration and spawning. The bridge supports will not be built in the water, with a distance of 150 metres between them. In the residential areas of the city of Jonava, noise barriers such as noise-absorbing walls, vibration dampers will be installed.
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