This came through yesterday – a noisy week ahead

Good morning everyone,

Apologies for the late weekly look ahead

We hope everyone has had a great week and you had a chance to enjoy some of the sunshine today.

Below is a wrap-up of construction activities happening on-site next week.

Surface Works

The big change out on site is the newly minted section of road across the site at the southern end. We’ve included a photo of the new road in action. After a false start on Tuesday, we managed to get the works complete on Wednesday and Thursday night and the road was opened in the early hours today.  The only final piece of work that will be required is to place some concrete barriers that didn’t make it last night and investigate a fix on what appears to be a loose pit lid. We’ll be doing this next and we estimate it should only take from around 9pm to  11pm to complete. The St Kilda Road southbound lane closure will be back in effect. Once the evening is confirmed I’ll send out a separate note.

With this new section of road now in place, we’ll start breaking out the old redundant road lane to expose the D-wall that sits underneath. This will effectively kick off the same construction sequence that has been happening over the past few months:

1. Excavation down to the roof level
2. Sucker trucks arrive to clean out the delayed pour strip section
3. Concrete pour to this strip to tie the station roof into the walls
4. Breaking down the excess d-wall
5. Waterproofing
6. Backfilling

The section of the D-wall in the middle of site was removed this week – we used a wire saw on this section as we had access to both sides of the wall. This significantly sped up the process when it came time to break out this section of the wall and reduced the extent of disruption. In this middle section it leaves us just one small section that currently sits underneath the access road across the site.

Moving entirely up the other end of the site to the north, you may have noticed that our the site sheds on St Kilda Road adjacent to the shrine grounds have now gone.  The team in this area are starting the work to prepare this road to come back into commission and act as the new southbound lane, which will continue through the existing site along the edge of Melbourne Grammar School.

The purpose of the road lane shuffling is to give the team access to get started on surface works prepare for the construction of the future tram alignment within the site boundary.

Next week will also see the start of works on Park Street to connect the new high voltage cable underneath St Kilda Road. You can see the setup on the map. It will require a bit of a pedestrian detour down Park Street while we have a pit opened up across the road. These works were going to start on Monday, but CitiPower have advised today that they’ll likely kick off the road closure on Wednesday.

Anzac Station entrance construction – Tram Interchange

The newest addition to the quickly evolving  canopy structure is the skylights, the aim this week is to get 4 of the 14 skylights completed. Next week will also see the addition of the roof cladding panels, these will cover up the drainage trays and wet fire services that have been installed over the past few weeks. As we mentioned last week, the kiosk is now really starting to take shape and we’re almost ready for the roof installation to take place. Friday afternoon the team were putting up scaffolding around the kiosk to provide worker access.

Station box construction

Down on the platform and concourse levels of the station it is largely business as usual. Down at the platform level the first ‘topping slabs’ have been poured on the platforms. The topping slabs are poured in sections on top of the installed pre-cast sections and like the precast segments themselves, the pours progressively move from south to north as the platform moves forward.  Up on the concourse level the last of the ventilation fans have been installed at the southern end of the station, this area is really starting to resemble its final configuration. The same ventilation setup will be installed in the northern section, and it is also starting to take shape as all the northern back-of-house rooms continue to get built up.

Thanks, Rob and Christian