Construction work on entrances to new railway platforms

It is hard to imagine that, from Arnold Schönberglaan, we were still looking onto the A10 Zuid embankment until just a year ago. In the space of just a few months, the workers from the Nieuw-Zuid Construction Consortium (BCNZ, made up of Mobilis, Boskalis and Van Gelder) completed the excavation work on the new Brittenpassage. And that is not all: they also installed retaining walls, built the foundations for the passageway floor and added in new supports. So, what happens now? ‘After an awful lot of steelwork, we’ve started on the concrete’, explains Yvo Zuurmond, planning engineer at BCNZ. ‘At the start of 2025, we’ll be building the new permanent railway platforms for the Brittenpassage. Before then, the concrete walls for the entrances leading to the platforms need to be ready. That’s where the staircases, escalators and the lift to the railway platforms will be. The platforms themselves will also be built onto these walls at a later stage. All of our attention is currently focused on building those walls.’

Building the stairways is a complex process, explains Zuurmond. ‘There’s a certain sequence to the work, you build from the bottom up and each step is only possible when the previous one has been fully completed.’ First of all, that means that all of the roof sections that are underneath the tracks and the A10 Zuid need to be supported by their permanent concrete columns. Zuurmond:  ‘We’ve recently been building all of the new columns. We then ensured that these columns are supporting the roof sections instead of the temporary steel supports. It was quite a job: we used a jack to raise the roof sections millimetre by millimetre. That job is now almost complete.’

The old supports were removed and sawn down to the ground. Zuurmond takes us to the place in the passageway where this has just happened. ‘After they’ve been sawn down, they have a cover placed onto them and we build the floor of the crawlspaces on top of that. These crawlspaces are where the technical systems for the shops will be, for example.’ In some places in the new passenger tunnel, this process is already well underway – this includes the place where a new bicycle storage facility will be located, where the walls of the crawlspace have actually already been poured. Right next to that, we can see how hard they are working to build the reinforcement for the walls of another section of crawlspace. ‘Once they’ve been completed, you have the foundations you need to build the entrances to the platforms. The walls alongside the stairways will follow after that.’

It all sounds pretty simple – the new concrete supports are now holding the roof sections in place and then you build from the crawlspace up towards the ‘ceiling’. But there are actually plenty of challenges, says Zuurmond. ‘As you can see, all sorts of things are now happening within a small space. In one place, we’ve almost completed the crawlspace, whereas in others we’re preparing the reinforcement or still jacking up the roof sections. In the process, you need to be able to access everywhere, with heavy machinery and equipment. As soon as you’ve poured the concrete for a floor, things start to get very difficult to navigate.’ In order to demonstrate what he means, Zuurmond pushes his way through some reinforcement cages. ‘Look, it’s already a struggle to walk to the far corner of the passageway. You can imagine what it’s like if you have to get a large piece of machinery there. The whole thing is quite a puzzle.’

The construction work on the two entrances to the railway platforms in the new Brittenpassage has a very tight deadline. This is because work on the final railway platforms starts in early 2025. In order to do that, no railway traffic will be possible on two separate occasions. These periods have already been set in stone and it is impossible to deviate from these dates. ‘But it certainly provide us with a strong incentive’, says Zuurmond. ‘It’s a difficult job, but it will work out. When the new platforms are completed, it will be a real milestone.’