Work starts on second new railway platform at Amsterdam Zuid

The walls of these entrances must have been completed before 12 March 2025, because then we will start to take apart the temporary railway platform (serving tracks 1 and 2) that has been in place here since the Brittenpassage was built. In order to replace it, we will be closing the platform from 12 to 26 March. The tall walls we are building now will ultimately form the (essential) foundations that will support the platform. Earlier this year, we did exactly the same with the other railway platform above the Brittenpassage (serving tracks 3 and 4).

Another important milestone is soon to be achieved, reveals Teun Wopereis, planning engineer at BCNZ. ‘At the same time as building the platform entrances, we’re also making a start on the finishing work on the Brittenpassage after years of construction. We’ve already begun to apply the first natural stone in the new passenger tunnel. We started on the walls of the future stairways, and the floor and other walls will follow after that. Soon, you’ll start to see the passageway really take shape.’

The fact that the finishing work is starting does not mean that the shell construction phase – the structural work for the Brittenpassage – is completely done. ‘Underneath the railway tracks, the structural work is more or less completed, but we’re still very hard at work on the concrete underneath the metro tracks. We’re also still preparing all of the crawlspace for the technical systems to be fitted. This is laborious, time-consuming work.’ We previously reported about the laying of a completely new route of cables and pipelines leading from Gustav Mahlerlaan to the Brittenpassage. ‘You just wouldn’t believe how many cables, pipelines and systems it takes to keep a station running. This is all being powered from the technical areas and everything will then be run through the passageway from there.’

Work is also still being done on the floors of the bicycle park. Two (concrete) underwater storage units are also being built in the new passageway. ‘We’re building one on the north and on the south side’, says Wopereis, pointing at some reinforcement rods protruding from the ground. ‘The one on the north side will be poured in situ and we’re building the one on the south side partly from concrete components in order to speed up construction.’ These water storage units will ultimately collect excess water which will then slowly be drained into the sewer. This is necessary because much of Zuidas is made of concrete and we are facing increasingly heavy rain showers. The sewer cannot always cope with this heavy rainfall. There have already been several occasions when the existing station passageway at Amsterdam Zuid station (the Minervapassage) has flooded.