By rosebell
Marti has completed the shell of two caverns for Bern’s new railway station.
The ARGE Marti RBS Lot 1.3 consortium has built the caverns 23m below the existing station without interrupting railway operations.
Bern station is the second largest on Switzerland’s rail network.
The caverns are each 17m high, about 200m long and 24m wide and required 144,200m3 of excavation and 43,466m3 of cast concrete. The centrepiece of the project is the ribbed vault comprising 84 exposed concrete blocks. It was built using a 260-tonne formwork trolley developed for the project.
Conventional concrete formulations were not suitable for the construction so Marti used its Quantum compound, a self-compacting exposed concrete with a lower cement content.
The consortium, comprising Marti Technik, Marti Tunnel and Marti AG Bern under the leadership of Marti Dienstleistungen, will now fit out the stations and install technical equipment.
Regionalverkehr Bern-Solothurn’s (RBS) existing Bern station opened in 1965 with a daily capacity of 16,000 passengers – way below the 60,000 people who use the station today. The station could not be expanded so a new station is being built under tracks two to seven.
Each of the two large underground halls houses two tracks and a 12m-wide central platform.
