A massive underground cavern is being carved out beneath Sydney's bustling Martin Place for the city's new flagship metro station. The Hunter Street station, set to open in 2032, will be Australia's largest underground rail cavern, presenting engineers with unique challenges.
Beneath Sydney’s busiest streets an underground cathedral is chiselled out for a flagship metro station. Every day, thousands of commuters unknowingly pass an entrance to another world beneath Sydney’s central city.
Hidden behind temporary walls at Martin Place metro station is a passageway to Australia’s largest underground rail cavern, which is being carved out of sandstone for the flagship station on the Inside the labyrinth of tunnels for the Hunter Street station, the scale of the excavation beneath office towers and city streets is jaw dropping. Like an underground cathedral, the cavern is 180 metres long and 24 metres from the crown of the roof to floor.In a sign of challenges confronting engineers, the new station’s cavern is just 1.8 metres beneath tunnels for the The new station is also sandwiched between the underground City Circle train line and a tunnel full of high-voltage cables which power the northern end of the CBD. Basements for high-rise office towers and the heritage-listed State Library add to the obstacles. As a result, the station has had to be designed to withstand enormous loads. Invented decades ago for the Snowy Hydro project, more than 3000 cable bolts – each about eight metres long – have been driven into the main cavern’s walls, and tensioned so that they pull up the rock, effectively forming strengthened beams.Once fully excavated and fitted out, it will serve as the platforms for the sole station in Sydney’s CBD on the Metro West line when it opens in 2032. Hunter Street station is expected to handle 10,000 passengers an hour in peak periods, making it the busiest on Sydney’s metro network. Its singular cavern sets it apart from most of the other stops on the new line, which will have separate tunnels for each platform. It will be similar to the space age-like Construction director Scott Connor says the 28-metre width of the cavern presented a massive technical challeng
Sydney Metro Underground Construction Infrastructure Engineering Challenges New Station
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