Good afternoon everyone,

I hope everyone stayed dry during today’s downpour.  

The team are crossing fingers and toes for some drier weather, as we need to switch southbound St Kilda Road traffic to its new lane next week.

Speaking of which – there will be a notification about these works hitting letterboxes shortly, I have attached the electronic copy here.

You might recall we have mentioned the road switch in the September and October notification, but todays notification has some information about the nightworks and overnight lane closures that will be required to put the switch into effect.

As always, we’re at the mercy of the weather, but we’re still targeting having the new road open on the morning of Thursday 12 October. To hit this date we will have some extended working hours up until 10pm next week.

These are all outlined in the notice and below.

Anzac Station entrance construction – Tram Interchange

The works under the canopy have moved from a focus on the construction of the canopy itself, to the rabbits warren of trenches that hold the various conduits and drainage for the platform. The second of the ‘strata vaults’ have also been excavated and installed. You might recall from a previous update, the strata vaults are effectively large inground planter boxes that create space under the tram platform for the tree roots to safely spread.  On the station platform itself, next week should see the start of the installation of the balustrades for around the tram stop oculus underneath the canopy.  

The most exciting thing around the tram canopy is the installation of the first sections of new tram tracks. These have gone down over the past few days and we’ll continue to install them over the coming weeks. These works are all happening ahead of the start of the 24/7 works on 27 November 2022, when buses replace trams and we break out the old tram alignment, and re-build it to connect into these new sections of track we are building inside the site. We’ve included a photo today of the new track sections installed this week.

Station box construction

Not a great deal of additional activity on the B1 level. At the northern end of the station the regular reference to ‘blockwork’ is nearly behind us, as the last of the rooms takes shape. The focus will be on the roughing in of services and installation of overhead cable trays. Down at the southern end the team remains focussed on completing key back-of-house rooms within the station. In between these two sections, concrete pours have been underway this week and will continue next week to pour sections of the wearing slab for the floors in the public area.

Down on platform level, the track slab is being poured through the station box, this will support the installation of the future track. In August this year the Eastern Portal site in South Yarra took delivery of the entire lengths of rail required to install track between Town Hall Station and the Eastern Portal.

Shrine Entrance

Next week at the Shrine entrance over near Domain Road will see the start of the steel fixing for the new section of roof. Once the roof is installed, the main excavation down to the future base slab will commence.

Surface Works

As mentioned in the intro – it is full steam ahead on the construction of the new section of St Kilda Road southbound. Tomorrow and next week will feature asphalting through the entire length of the site, as well as barrier installation and line marking.

In order to get the road switch happening, the asphalting, line-marking and barrier installation will continue up until 10pm on weeknights (and 3pm tomorrow). This is outlined in the attached notification.

There are also two full night of work to switch traffic onto its new alignment.

You’ll also see in the notification that we’ve set out two contingency days for the switch to the new lane, unfortunately we lost almost the entire day today to rain (Friday) if we lose another day on Saturday then we’ll be almost certain to push back to the first of our contingency days.
We’ll issue an update email to this group to let you know what night the overnight switch works will occur.

Other notable work on the surface level is the ventilation shafts. The southern sections of precast began installation this week and next week will see the stitch pours to connect these both the northern and southern ventilation precast sections to the station roof. Backfill (and any rolling) wont be happening until the following week.

Regards, Rob and Christian