Sydney Metro West’s Westmead station has achieved a first for the Southern Hemisphere, with the project housing the largest cavern formwork system of its kind.
The formwork will assist with lining the new station cavern walls. The tallest cavern on the Sydney Metro network has already been fully lined, standing at about 26 metres tall.
In a tightly coordinated 82-hour operation, crews jacked and winched the temporary arch into position with millimetres to spare. Once the structure was in place, the team completed a 1941-tonne concrete pour to create the cavern’s 2.5-metre-thick walls.
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It took almost 12 months of careful planning and collaboration – along with multiple crawler cranes – to construct the structure that reaches 21 metres high, equivalent to a seven-storey building.
On top of the formwork delivery, crews are also now retrieving the 1200-tonne Tunnel Boring Machines (TBMs) that arrived beneath Westmead in September and October, lifting each machine out in sections through an opening in the roof of the acoustic shed built over the station cavern.
Meanwhile, tunnelling at the eastern end is approaching its final breakthrough to Hunter Street in Sydney’s CBD, with TBMs Ruby and Jessie now less than 550 metres from completing the 24-kilometre twin tunnels.
For more information on the Sydney Metro West’s Westmead station, click here.
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