The New Lynn rail trench is the biggest section of Project DART that remains to be completed. This trench is a critical project that will ensure that the railway line can be double-tracked through New Lynn while not cutting the township in two and preventing good quality future pedestrian linkages from one side of the place to the other. This is what the Project DART website says about the New Lynn trench:
Building the rail trench is one of the most technically challenging of the DART projects. It involves major construction on a narrow strip of land in a busy town centre, and we need to keep the trains running and traffic moving as the trench is built.
The trench is being built in several stages. Much preparation work has been done to clear the land by moving services, such as water and gas, away from the area that will become the trench.
The track was initially moved to one side to give us more space to build the northern wall. That wall is now largely complete and on the weekend of March 21 and 22 the track was moved onto it so that work could start on the second, southern wall.There is a new temporary station on Totara Ave which makes getting between the train, buses and shops even easier than before.
Both the walls of the trench must be built underground before we can dig out the trench. Excavation will start around the middle of 2009 and the floor can then be laid.
The trench and station will be in use by mid-2010.
Since I last visited the site in July there has been quite a lot of work done – especially in terms of excavating out the trench further to the west, and also putting the concrete cap on the trench around where the roads will travel over it. The whole Clark Street roundabout mess is currently being managed by a complicated set of traffic lights, and while the station isn’t particularly visible yet (well at least it wasn’t to me), we should see some good progress on that over the next few months.
Anyway, here are some of the photos that I took on Sunday of how things are coming along:
This photo looks west from where Clark Street currently crosses over the future trench. The current railway line sneaks along the far right edge of the photo. Back a few months ago this section had not even begun to be excavated. As an aside, does anyone know what the huge metal cross-beams are for? Are they permanent or just temporary to provide the side walls with enough strength to handle the trains running along them?
This is a similar photo, although from slightly further along where the road goes over the trench. The current railway track is more clearly visible on the right of the photo.
This photo looks back the other way from the other side of the road at roughly the same point. It seems like this part of the trench has yet to be fully dug out. This is the general area where the future train station will be located.
This photo looks west from the existing rail platform. The current track has extra guidance rails to ensure that something really bad happened to the train and it tried to derail, it physically couldn’t topple over into the rail trench. Apparently the extra rails are used quite frequently on bridges.
This photo is taken from a similar spot to the last one, and looks directly down into the trench. It gives you some idea about how deep it is. I’m pretty sure that’s about the location of the future station.
And finally, another photo that looks into the rail trench from the existing platform.
It was quite difficult to get good photos of the works going on at New Lynn station. There are a lot of barricades up around the place to ensure a safe working site, plus most of the work is going on below ground level – which makes it inherently difficult to get a particularly good idea about what’s going on. Hopefully over the next few months we’ll see things take shape a bit more clearly.
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I’m no engineer (so I’m unsure as to correct terminologies) but I’ve observed that the ‘huge metal cross beams’ appear to be temporary supports for the walls that are installed onto the clay bed half way through excavation; the remaining fill is then excavated and a double layer of reinforced concrete is laid over the base; the ‘cross beams’ are then decoupled from the T sections at their ends and craned out. In terms of the station construction it appears that the platform walls have been raised as have the underlying track layouts. Best seen from a train!
Interesting to see what effect this has on the economic development of New Lynn. At present the area is run down in places but I suspect the improved visual amenity and traffic flow will attract businesses to the area. There is a new supermarket going in on the other side of Clark St. Now all they need to do is find a way to clean up the bus station so that it is more pedestrian friendly.
The bus station is going to be shifted completely. There are some very grand plans for New Lynn.
What would actually be awesome in the long run is if they covered it and either created a park or some space for business over the top.
I’d guess those cross beams are for support, fully loaded trains are running on a concrete wall… Probably a redundancy as you have to over-engineer these things to a design strength of a least 4 times what is the theoretical minimum…
Early drawings of the (proposed) rail trench suggested that the bus station would be (at least in part) on the top of the rail trench. This of course may not be correct and only a pretty concept plan.
I still think that is the plan. Though I am not sure when it will happen, maybe not immediately when the station is completed.
They have already started construction increasing the sewer lines from the Portage Rd roundabout to cater for 2,500 new homes to be situated (somewhere on Bricklane I think) at the rear of the new supermarket which has been operating for a few weeks now.
The Portage Rd Roundabout will be removed and a set of lights put in its place.
Astley Ave will be closed off from the lights.
There will be 2 lanes each way to and from the new motorway that finishes at the rear of Stoddard Rd
There will be an over-bridge of sorts on the Portage Rd rail-crossing and the Ward St rail-crossing so I’m guessing that the new terminal wont be completely underground.
There’s some good information on the plans for New Lynn here: http://www.waitakere.govt.nz/Abtcit/cp/pdf/movingforward.pdf
You’re talking about an arterial upgrade there to four lanes of all the streets between New Lynn and Maioro Rd interchange right..?
That’s the plan. Auckland City got about a third of the way through doing the Tiverton Road/Wolverton Street section but then gave up due to budget cuts.
Yeah they got to about Blockhouse Bay Rd didn’t they..? Where is the WCC/ACC boundary..?
The boundary is next to the playground at Olympic Park. I think there’s a small bridge around there which goes over the upper reaches of the Whau River, and that forms the boundary.
With Clark Street becoming a more major road it could threaten to divide New Lynn just like the railway line in the past. Could a pedestrian underpass/subway between the railway station and the southern side of clark street be an option or are subways disparaged because of safety risks at night?
Replacing of the Portage Rd roundabout with yet another set of lights seems a no-brainer. There will then be 4 sets of light along Clark St. Any hold-up, such as the reduction to 1 lane around the roundabout already causes serious build-up of traffic and lights could well make this worse. Have traffic engineers forgotten that roundabouts move traffic more efficiently and sfely than lights?
There’s an interesting debate to be held about traffic-lights v roundabouts. Roundabouts are safer, although they are quite unfriendly for pedestrians.
Try cycling through a double laned roundabout. Its a deathtrap.
Strangely enough, Fletcher’s closed down work on the NLRT between 23 December and 12 January; odd since there were, of course, no trains and you’d think that they might have scheduled some of the work to take advantage of this. Since then work has re-started although current manning levels are light. There’s evidently no urgency involved and no attempt to progress the work to an earlier completion. It’s obvious that the construction schedule was heavily padded and it would be generous to attribute it to inexperience with rail related infrastructure and a retarded delivery schedule for essential components. Mind you, if it had been a motorway it would probably have been completed, oh, I don’t know, a couple of decades back. Nonetheless this languid attitude isn’t helping western line passengers get a more efficient service sooner. It’s a similar situation at Avondale.