Good afternoon everyone, We’re well and truly into spring, and we’re doing our bit to add some greenery around the site with the addition of some freshly planted grass and some new trees along St Kilda Road – just in time for the Melbourne Marathon to make its way down St Kilda Road (best of luck to anyone tackling a run this weekend).
The big focus for the team at the moment is the tying of steel on the roof of the Albert Road Reserve station entrance. The pouring of this roof will ultimately allow us to backfill the area and pop on another lane for St Kilda Road.
Just a reminder that next week is an RDO, so we’ll be resuming activities on Tuesday.
- Albert Road legacy construction
Some of the concrete barriers on St Kilda Road were replaced with temporary fencing to facilitate a new gate for the Albert forecourt works. Next week, the crews will start to tidy up the area and commence excavation. On Friday, a tree on Albert Road will be pruned to make way for the installation of new street poles. This should only take a couple of hours in the middle of the day. During this time, there will be a contraflow arrangement on Albert Road.
Towards Kings way, paving and finishes continue as we continue the works on the future green wedge between the future station and Kings Way.
- Albert Road Reserve Station Entrance (night works)
As we mentioned in the intro – the big push for us is to get the roof of the station entrance done in this area. The good news is that we’ll be pouring the first section of the roof slab next week. This will be shortly followed by waterproofing and backfilling.
Crews are continuing to work until 1am in the station entrance to install and remove the reinforcement for the stairs, internal walls and roof.
You can see below the progress of the roof as it makes its way from east to west across the roof. In a sign of the station infrastructure coming together – you can also see the beginnings of the new circular elevator shaft to the left of the picture, and in another great development, we’ve got the concrete stairs poured within the main station entrance point.
- Station Fitout
Down underground inside the station, the back of house rooms are nearly complete with teams busily working on the flooring, painting and signage installation for the myriad of rooms that form the back of house of the new staiton.
- Shrine Entrance (night works)
At the Shrine entrance, the team is ready to receive the glass reinforced concrete panels and escalators. Soon after these are installed we will start working on the footing for the entrance canopy – which will eventually see the second set of green legs installed within the station (albeit not as many as the main entrance).
- St Kilda Road – Bowen Lane to Bowen Crescent (night works)
Next week is a busy week in Bowen Lane to Bowen Crescent – we will finish the gas installation early next week at Bowen Lane and follow that with the start of the sewer connection and a strata vault in the second half of the week that will support future planting.
Last night the architectural cladding for the inlet exhaust in the median arrived. These will be hung into place on an extended evening shift on Tuesday 17 October. We’ll have a crane on the road as soon as St Kilda Road city-bound closes (around 9pm) the crane will be used to install the last of the architectural cladding.
South East Water have advised us that they’ve pushed back their works to install a water valve has been delayed to Thursday 19 October (with Friday as contingency). The location of the valve is within our site, opposite Bowen Lane on the Melbourne Grammar School side. Most of the work will take place during the day but the final touches will happen at night. South East Water will contact those who are affected.
Before the end of the month, we will undertake site investigations on Bowen Crescent in preparation for our underground LV connection. This will include saw cutting and NDD and we’ll extend the pedestrian detour a little further down Bowen Crescent while the works are underway.
- St Kilda Road Bowen Crescent to Toorak Road
Northbound Side (Towards City) (night works)
Last night, the barriers were removed on the southern side of Kings Way. A few still remain between Kings Way and Bowen Crescent, these will be removed tonight.
We will do some minor works to update the line marking in the Kings Way / Toorak Road / St Kilda Road intersection on Tuesday night 17 October.
Southbound side (Away from City)
You will have noticed a big change on the outbound with the replacement of concrete barriers with bollards. Next steps for this section is to commission the irrigation system, profile and lay the final wearing course of road and line mark. Once this is done, we will be able open up parking in this stretch.
Drainage works continue between Bromby and Toorak road with the final connection works starting from tomorrow with the closure of a laneway. Once drainage is complete, we still have a few weeks in this area to complete the separated bike lanes and road.
Have a great weekend all,
Rob and Remy
The Botanica 