Victoria Cross Station: update

Constructing the Victoria Cross Station platform has been like building a ship in a bottle, as the entrance to the construction site is as big as an ordinary garage door.

All components for the station need to arrive in parts, transported into place and constructed in the 300 metre long, 25 metre wide and 16 metre high cavern, which is the largest rail cavern in Australia.

To build the 170 metre long platforms, 405 precast concrete panels were lowered 50 metres down into the station cavern by a tower crane.

Once lowered into the station, they were pulled 50 metres by a tough tug machine, before being lowered 10 metres down onto the station floor by another crane within the cavern. 

The largest of these precast platform segments weighed 7.2 tonnes and the entire process took about five months to complete.

Next up, the Sydney Metro Linewide contractor, Systems Connect, will start to lay the tracks and electrical ready for services to start in 2024. The Victoria Cross contractor, Lendlease, completed the track slabs in early 2022, ready for tracks to be installed.

Works that has been completed so far includes:

• The mezzanine, which will be the main entry and exit point for customers, has now been built. Connected by an escalator, the mezzanine will be suspended over the platform, and has been built using 950 tonnes of steel reinforcement and approximately 260 tonnes of concrete.
• Over 5,400 tonnes of concrete has been poured to date (enough to fill over seven Olympic swimming pools).
• 6,200 tonnes of reinforcement steel have been used to reinforce concrete structures, such as the floors, wall, columns and lift shafts in the southern part of the site. 1,760 tonnes of reinforcement is also being installed in the northern building structure.