Located in the heart of Sydney’s CBD, Sydney Metro’s integrated station development at Martin Place will include the new Martin Place metro station, two new commercial buildings above the station, a retail space, new underground pedestrian connections and improvements to
the public domain.
The John Holland CPB Ghella (JHCPBG) joint venture was contracted to deliver the tunnel and station excavation works for the Sydney Metro City & Southwest project, which included the excavation of the Martin Place Station site.
Construction of the Martin Place Station site included building an underground platform-to-platform connection between the existing heritage-listed Martin Place Station and the new Sydney Metro Martin Place Station – built mainly by excavating new pedestrian tunnels from the Sydney Metro construction site.
Faced with a challenging schedule of works, JHCPBG partnered with The Men From Marr’s for a solution.
Excavation and construction works on a congested CBD site in the middle of a busy pedestrian thoroughfare and high traffic area presented a number of challenges in terms of access, in particular the heavy equipment required onsite at different stages of the works to meet the demanding programme.
Added to these constraints, JHCPBG’s scope of works included lifting into the site 14 plunge columns that were 30-metres long and weighing 80 tonnes each as well as the associated 90-tonne drilling rigs, excavators and spoil removal.
The original craneage scheme proposed the use of two crawler cranes and a small tower crane installed on a steel platform to complete general and medium lifting requirements. For the heavy lifting requirements, a mobile crane operating on the street was proposed, but this would have required costly road closures and associated risks to the construction programme. This solution could also only deliver the plunge columns in 20-tonne sections which then had to be assembled and welded onsite prior to installation.
Marr’s solution was to eliminate the need for road occupancies by installing one of its M1280D heavy lift luffers to do all the lifting from a single point within the site. This also allowed for the 80-tonne, 30-metre plunge columns to be prefabricated offsite and lowered into their final position.
The M1280D heavy lift solution gave JHCPBG the flexibility to meet the demands of lifting a range of different equipment as requirements changed on the project – which meant delays to the construction schedule were avoided.
The Martin Place South site was delivered ahead of schedule and Marr’s has now been engaged by the construction partners appointed to construct the follow on above ground works on Sydney Metro Martin Place Station.
Will Freelander, construction manager, JHCPBG, Martin Place Station, said: “As tunnellers, tower cranes are not necessarily something we have a lot of experience in, and certainly as we discussed at the start of the project there were some fears of that unknown quantity that the tower crane and its operation introduced. These fears were unfounded. To date Martin Place south site has delivered on all its milestones and KPI’s.”
