With both piers finished on the new Main Street Bridge in Niles, workers have turned their attention to completing construction of the abutment on the west side of the St. Joseph River.

Chris Jacobs, an engineer with the Michigan Department of Transportation, said crews are in the process of driving piles for the west-side abutment, which refers to the substructure at the end of the bridge.

“That will be up to two to three weeks of driving piles,” he said.

Work on the $10.6 million MDOT project to replace the 90-year-old Main Street Bridge began in October.

MDOT officials originally set an open-to-traffic date for mid November of this year. The schedule has been pushed back a couple weeks.

“We are still working on making up time, but we still plan to open to traffic this year,” Jacobs said. “Everything is going very smoothly now. We hope that continues so we can keep making up time.”

Other than building the west-side abutment, the next big project will be placing beams that, when set end-to-end, will span the entire river on top of the piers and abutments.

Each beam is about 120 feet long, and it will take three beams laid end-to-end to span the entire bridge from one abutment to the other. The project will use a total of 21 beams.

Jacobs said they would start setting beams on the east side of the bridge, from the east abutment to the first pier and then from the first pier to the second.

“We can actually set those (beams) once they are done being fabricated, which will be the first week of August,” he said.