Fagioli wins ILTA award for 7,000-tonne Austrian viaduct lift

A whole deck raised in one synchronised movement

The award, handed over at a ceremony on 26 September 2025, covers a job Fagioli carried out in May 2024 on one of Austria’s busiest north-south motorway corridors. The contractor lifted a steel viaduct deck around 600 metres long and weighing roughly 7,000 tonnes in a single synchronised operation, spread over three consecutive days.

The lift used a synchronised strand jack system working through temporary structures designed specifically for the crossing. On a structure of that length the control problem is as demanding as the load itself: every jacking point has to keep step with the others so that the deck is never twisted or locally overloaded while it is off its bearings.

The deck became the construction platform

The ILTA Awards category the entry won — transport and/or lifting using combined techniques — is specifically for projects that mix disciplines rather than relying on a single method, which fits a scheme in which jacking, temporary works and a construction sequence were designed as one package.

What makes the scheme unusual is what happened after the lift. Once raised, the old steel deck was not removed but kept in the air and used as a working track for building the new reinforced concrete viaduct beneath and around it. That allowed traffic to keep running on the A10 for the duration of the works, which is normally the hardest constraint to satisfy on a motorway replacement.

The numbers behind the job

Fagioli’s own project report at the time of the operation gave slightly different figures for the same structure: a 650-metre, 6,200-tonne viaduct near Spittal an der Drau raised by 5.8 metres for main contractor ICM Construction GmbH. That lift was made with eight portals, one on each pier head, plus two towers on the abutments, carrying 20 strand jacks in total — 16 rated at 600 tonnes and four at 450 tonnes.

Strand jacks are the standard tool for this class of work because they can be distributed around a structure and driven from a single synchronised control system, so capacity is added by adding jacks rather than by finding a bigger machine. On a viaduct the practical limits are usually the strength of the deck between jacking points and the load the piers can accept from temporary portals, not the lifting capacity itself.

Fagioli described the recognition as confirmation of its engineering approach on combined-technique projects, where jacking, temporary works design and construction sequencing have to be solved together rather than in turn.

Source: Fagioli — Photos: Fagioli