Sydney’s Metro Landscape is Rising

IT will slice across Sydney’s suburban landscape for 4km and is set to ­become one of the city’s transport infrastructure landmarks.

The $340 million Skytrain elevated railway — to run from Bella Vista to Rouse Hill up to 13m above the ground — will be the most visually spectacular part of the $11 billion Sydney Metro.

Carrying single-deck driverless trains, the stand-alone line from Rouse Hill to Bankstown, via the CBD and a Sydney Harbour rail tunnel, is designed to service up to 30 trains an hour through the city centre. There are also plans to run the line via Sydney University or Waterloo and build a station at Artarmon.

Local residents are already noticing that work on the first section of the line, the Sydney Metro Northwest from Rouse Hill to Chatswood — the part including the Sky­train — is well under way.

Its curving bridge over Windsor Rd will be the ­elevated railway’s most eye-catching feature. Similar in ­design to the Anzac Bridge, it will be 270m long and supported by 32 steel cables connected to two 45 metre-high towers.

The Skytrain is being built by Italian civil engineering consortium Salini Impregilo using up to 400 workers.

Sydney Metro project ­director Rodd Staples said work was well advanced on ­assembling two 600-tonne horizontal cranes ­designed to hoist the 1200 concrete sections needed to build the elevated section of the metro. Each crane had to be shipped to Australia in 22 containers.

“It’s like putting ­together the biggest Meccano set you can ever get,” Mr Staples said.

“We’re using these two massive 150 metre-long gantry systems. But before they can start work we need to the build the pylons for the Skytrain.

“About 120 of those pylons are going in across the corridor (about 40m apart) and we’re well advanced with that, getting ready for the structure to go in using this gantry system.”

Work on the Skytrain, which includes elevated stations, is due to finish some time in 2017. The line to Chatswood, which includes twin 15km tunnels now being dug, should see its first trains rolling out in the first half of 2019.

Source : DailyTelg.