Soldier Pile Wall

A Soldier Pile Wall is a type of retaining wall mostly used for construction. These walls are usually only in place until the below grade portion of a building can be backfilled. A typical project is shown here.

This project is on the U of MN campus in Minneapolis. The project is to tear down an existing building and build a new one in its place. In order to place the footings and the basement portions of the new building Wenzel Engineering had to design a soldier pile wall for excavations of up to 40'.

Here is a shot of the demo, just for fun (below).

This is at the shorter end of the wall. The soldier piles are just to the left of that big yellow box. You can see at this site not all of the structure was demoed, the wall on the right was saved to be re-used on the new building.


This is at the deeper section (below). The soldier piles are the steel beams that are driven like piles. The soil on the front side of them is excavated from top down and as the soil is excavated lagging boards are attached to contain the soil.

When the excavation reaches certain depths anchors are needed. The anchors are attached to the piles by wales. The wales are the horizontal channels in this picture.