About This Reference
The Illinois Concrete Pipe Handbook is an independent editorial reference covering reinforced concrete pipe, precast box sections and associated drainage structures as they are specified and installed in Illinois. It exists because that material is scattered: some of it sits inside paid consensus standards, some inside state road and bridge specifications, some inside national design manuals, and the practical connective tissue between them — which product for which fill height, which joint for which condition, which test decides acceptance — is rarely written down in one continuous place.
Non-affiliation notice
This site is not affiliated with, endorsed by, sponsored by or connected to any trade association, manufacturer, standards body or public agency. In particular it is not the Illinois Concrete Pipe Association and does not speak for it; that organisation is a separate body which publishes its own material at illinois.concretepipe.org. Nor is it connected to the American Concrete Pipe Association, to ASTM International, to AASHTO, or to the Illinois Department of Transportation. References to those organisations and to their published standards appear here for citation only.
What this site is
- A structured digest of product standards, class-selection tables, dimensional data and installation practice for rigid concrete drainage conduit.
- A place to check the shape of a decision quickly — what governs, what the ranges are, what the acceptance test will be — before opening the governing document.
- Written for design engineers, municipal and agency specifiers, inspectors and underground contractors.
What this site is not
- Not a substitute for the governing documents. Standards are revised. Tables here reflect the editions from which they were compiled and are reproduced as reference data, not as a current specification. Always design to the current standard and the current agency specification.
- Not a membership organisation. There is nothing to join, no directory, no dues, no meetings.
- Not a supplier or a broker. No products are sold here and no manufacturer is recommended. Availability of any given size, shape or class varies by region and by plant, and only a local producer can confirm it.
- Not a source of contact details for anyone else. Where the underlying source material carried the names, addresses or telephone numbers of individual people and companies, those have been removed.
How the material is sourced
Technical content is compiled from published consensus standards and public engineering literature: ASTM product and test specifications and their AASHTO equivalents, national design manuals and design data sheets, federal culvert hydraulics guidance, and state standard specifications for road and bridge construction. Numeric tables — dimensions, waterway areas, approximate weights, class-by-fill-height selection — are reproduced as factual data. Explanatory text is written for this site.
Corrections and limits
No warranty is made as to the accuracy or sufficiency of anything published here, and no responsibility is accepted for use or misuse of it. Design decisions on a real project belong to a licensed engineer working from current documents and site-specific information. Where this handbook and a governing standard disagree, the standard is correct and this handbook is wrong.
Further reading, including the national design aid series and the manuals that go far deeper than any web page usefully can, is listed under design aids and reference links.