Good afternoon everyone,

Hope everyone has had a great week.

We are writing today with our next weekly construction lookahead.

Works this coming week are generally business as usual, with the major change being the return of excavation in the south box.

ANZAC STATION WEEKLY LOOK AHEAD

Tunnelling and TBM support site

TBM Alice has completed 1.3 kilometres of the 1.8 kilometre journey to the Town Hall Station. Currently, she has passed beneath the Queen Victoria Gardens opposite the National Gallery of Victoria and is now tunnelling beneath Alexandra Avenue as she makes her way closer to the Yarra River.

The slurry treatment plant at Edmund Herring Oval continues to operate, treating the spoil coming from TBMs Millie and Alice. Trucks for spoil disposal will continue for the duration of tunnelling in the East.  

Anzac Station entrance construction – Tram Interchange

Works are largely the same as last week’s update, for those with a view over the site you’ll see the blue waterproofing being applied from north to south, in some areas it looks like we are building a series of swimming pools at the base of the interchange. These are in fact the pits for various parts of the station’s legacy infrastructure, including the base for lift wells and the base of the future escalators. We’ve attached a photo looking over the site for those without a balcony view of the works.

While the waterproofing moves forward, steel fixing for the first base slab pour is following close behind. As we mentioned in last week’s look-ahead, steel fixing is one of the quieter activities as it is done largely by hand, in the coming weeks there may be some steel fixing carried out up until 10pm in the tram interchange. Any steel will be pre lowered into the box prior to 6pm to avoid unnecessary disruption.

Anzac Station entrance construction – Shrine of Remembrance

Backfilling work continues at the Shrine of Remembrance station entrance site. This will continue for the next few weeks.

Breaking back of the retention piles down to their correct height began this week and will continue into next week, this may generate periods of high level noise.

Station box construction

In the southern section of the station box the large concrete pour that went ahead on Monday was very successful, it was over 1200m3 and was the largest concrete pour carried out on the entire project to date.

The pour is now covered and has been curing since Monday. Early next week the concourse will have cured and the team will start removing the falsework deck that supported the concourse as it was poured. Once the falsework deck is removed, work will then focus on the next stage of excavation of the sacrificial tunnel beneath the concourse slab. This excavation work is likely to start late next week.

As we mentioned in last week’s update, as part of this next stage, the team will also trial 24/7 excavation underground. During the first stage of excavation the 24/7 excavation was at times disruptive and had to be stopped on several occasions.  We will conduct a trial of excavators running under the concrete decks after 10pm and will closely monitor the noise to ensure this is not repeated. The key difference between the last stage of excavation and this one is that we are now excavating below both the roof slab and the concourse slab, and are further away from the open void.

The start of this excavation will also see the return of load-out works, with a long-reach excavators loading trucks that will drive from site. As was the case last time, the load out of excavated material will continue up until 10pm on nights. As with the underground excavation, the lessons learned from last time will be applied – with all light towers running off mains power and the excavator operators barred from using the bucket on concrete to scrape up loose material.  Loadout from 6pm to 10pm will only be of softer materials with no load-out of concrete segments into truck beds.

In the northern end of the station box underneath the acoustic shed, the team quietly achieved a major milestone on Tuesday with the pour of the first section of the concourse level underneath the acoustic shed. While somewhat overshadowed by the large pour in the south box, this pour is a major milestone as the station infrastructure starts to take shape, as tunnelling winds down.

Thanks, Rob and Jordan