Flyover lifting operation successfully completed

The winter sunshine marked a perfect start to the morning of Saturday, 13 December. A total of 167 people had registered in advance to come and watch this veritable milestone while enjoying a cup of hot chocolate and an oliebol doughnut. At the De Nieuwe Meer junction, a large crane lifted the very first girders (concrete beams) into position for the new flyover that will connect the A10 Zuid to the A4 (in the direction of Schiphol/The Hague). These huge girders will ultimately support the road surface for the flyover.

Experts from Zuidasdok and the TriAX construction consortium (Besix, Dura Vermeer and Heijmans) were on hand to provide members of the public with an explanation and share some useful facts. For example, about the girders themselves: each of them weighs between 36 and 45 tonnes, roughly the equivalent of seven adult elephants. The whole flyover will ultimately be 300 m long and 15 m wide, requiring a total of 120 girders to build it. These are not being lifted into position all at once. During this last weekend, we lifted 24 of the monsters into position on top of the most easterly flyover support.

Another interesting fact: the flyover will be located in a bend, which makes building it anything but straightforward. In order to create the bend, we will need 100 types of girders, all of them slightly different in size and shape. However, all of them are approximately 30 m long. The girders are being pre-built in Kootstertille in Friesland, and are being brought to us by means of special transport. The next set of girders will be fitted in March 2026. The flyover is expected to be completed in 2028.

In order to get the girders into position, we closed the road connecting the A10 Zuid and the A10 West from 22:00 on Friday, 12 December. Traffic remained relatively calm and drivers were not delayed by any more than 10 minutes. At around 22:00 on the evening of Sunday, 14 December – slightly earlier than planned – we reopened the road. It marked the end of a smooth and successful weekend.

The flyover is part of the reconstruction of the De Nieuwe Meer junction that is needed in order to widen the A10 Zuid by adding two extra lanes for local traffic. In the future, traffic from the city will either use the S108/Amstelveenseweg or the S109/Europaboulevard to reach the new parallel carriageway. Drivers will then be able to take the new flyover from the De Nieuwe Meer junction to reach the A4 Schiphol/Rotterdam.