{"id":45466,"date":"2013-08-26T08:30:37","date_gmt":"2013-08-26T12:30:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/spacing.ca\/toronto\/?p=45466"},"modified":"2013-08-25T20:59:39","modified_gmt":"2013-08-26T00:59:39","slug":"lorinc-union-station-re-visited-part-ii","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/spacing.ca\/toronto\/2013\/08\/26\/lorinc-union-station-re-visited-part-ii\/","title":{"rendered":"LORINC: Union Station re-visited, part II"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/p>\n

It\u2019s sometimes said that surgeons and commercial pilots out-distance all other professions for sang froid<\/em> and audacity. But if I had to make another nomination, I\u2019d choose civil and structural engineers. They have nerves of steel.<\/p>\n

Take the example of the new GO concourse and retail plaza now being built under the western end of the railway tracks behind Union Station\u2019s head house. For more than eight decades, the tracks were supported by row upon row of one metre-thick concrete and steel columns \u2014 447 in all \u2014 which extended down below the tracks, through metres of the infill muck, and down to the shale bedrock upon which the city rests.<\/p>\n

A big piece of the Union Station revitalization involves the construction of a dual layer of space \u2014 a more open and accessible concourse beneath the platforms, and then a second level below that, for a vast retail area. Think two and a half football fields, all underground. City officials refer to the project as the \u201cDig Down\u201d \u2014 never to be confused with \u201cBig Dig,\u201d<\/a> Boston\u2019s $23 billion expressway burial fiasco.<\/p>\n

The task involved excavating hundreds of thousands of tonnes of muck from beneath the tracks in order to create space for that lower level. Here\u2019s where the engineering chutzpah comes in: to make the retail level presentable, the engineers had to slice out a several-metre-high piece of each of those columns \u2014 the rough-hewn lower part that had been encased in lake fill for decades \u2014 and replace it with a slimmer, stronger and better supported one.<\/p>\n

Each column is part of a row that holds up a railway track capable of supporting a passenger train weighing thousands of tonnes. So you can see that kicking the legs out from beneath such a structure is, well, the very essence of audaciousness. A big fat hairy deal.<\/p>\n

\"Union-Station-renovation-00670\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Last week, superintendant Doug Gair, who works for Carillion, the contractor in charge of the concourse project, took Spacing to see the final three columns that were being replaced, as well as many other features of the western concourse. (View more photos of the tour<\/a>, and check out the City\u2019s fact sheet<\/a>.)<\/p>\n

Engineers with Carillion and NORR, the other partner in this venture, had calculated early on that they couldn\u2019t risk working on more than three columns at any given time. What\u2019s more, each had to be supporting different tracks.<\/p>\n

To cut one of these things, the contractors first erect four vertical braces around the column, each anchored to bedrock below and wedged up to the bottom of the track slab above. When that structure is complete, Gair explained, the crews install hydraulic jacks at the top of these vertical braces and slowly raise the track, overhead, by 3 mm. \u201cThat means we\u2019ve de-stressed the column,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

With the load transferred to the vertical braces, the crews can slice out the lower portion of the column, repair the rebar, and then build up the new pedestal and column with horizontal \u201ctension wraps\u201d \u2014 bands of steel cable. The leaner, cleaner column is just 38 inches in diameter.<\/p>\n

To date, Carillion has completed 182 of these column replacement jobs, and Gair said that they\u2019ve reduced the time to finish each one from 28 days to 18 as the crews become more familiar with the behaviour of the material. He noted that contractors have performed similar operations under buildings when expanding an underground parking garage. \u201cThis,\u201d he added, \u201cis unique in that you\u2019ve got live train loads overhead.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Union-Station-renovation-00703\"<\/a><\/p>\n

(See the above photo in a 3,000 pixel-wide panorama<\/a> on Spacing’s Flickr page<\/a>)<\/em><\/p>\n

As Gair led us around this sprawling, semi-lit world of heavy equipment and gravel heaps and canyons of scaffolding, he explained some of the other features of the project. On a slurry wall near York Street, Gair pointed out a heavy wooden beam, about a foot square, that was a remnant of one of the old timber piers that the excavation crews kept digging up during the excavation phase. That massive piece of wood \u2014 it probably came from a towering pine \u2014 couldn\u2019t be moved because it\u2019s still supporting something, and so it has been incorporated into the renewed Union Station, a relic from the past that may, some day many years hence, be rediscovered.<\/p>\n

Elsewhere, he showed us a network of heated floor pipes that will extend from the food court to a concrete cistern near the loading bay. Their purpose: to shunt cooking oil from the restaurants to a \u201ccentral grease interceptor,\u201d essentially a large pit where fat can be pumped out and hauled off site.<\/p>\n

At the western end, in an area that the contractors refer to as \u201cback-of-house,\u201d the crews installed a thick waterproof membrane over the exposed ground as a way of containing the \u201chydrostatic pressure\u201d that has built up in the groundwater beneath the downtown as more and more very large buildings go up south of Front Street.<\/p>\n

When you\u2019re down in that noisy, controlled-access construction site, those sleek condo towers and office buildings south of Front seem like a world away. But as our tour of this subterranean space wrapped up, it occurred to me that Union Station\u2019s huge new retail precinct \u2014 which will mirror the PATH system north of Front \u2014 seems destined to become the commercial and social hub of that forest of impersonal towers that has risen between Union Station and Queen\u2019s Quay.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m guessing this new piece of underground Toronto won\u2019t function at all like the financial district PATH network, which is a high-polish, office-duds-only zone. Rather, these new nether regions of Union Station will become 24\/7 spaces, South Town\u2019s very own high street, but built down on the plane of the ancient lake bed, with bits of old pier secreted away in the walls overlooking the food court.<\/p>\n

photos by Jacob Lorinc<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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