Major construction has finished on Sydney’s landmark new railway bridge at Rouse Hill.
The bridge will carry a new metro train every four minutes in the peak when Sydney Metro services start in the first half of 2019.
Track laying activities will soon start on the iconic 270m bridge over Windsor Road, similar in design to Sydney’s Anzac Bridge, but the first cable-stayed railway bridge built on a curve in Australia.
The bridge deck is supported by 127 steel cables which stretch 173km.
The bridge’s two towers, with reach 45m above Windsor Rd, were installed in May 2017 then each filled with 336 tonnes of concrete.
Then, 16 cable pipes – the longest 62m – were installed from each tower to the deck.
The pipes hold 127 steel cables which support the deck.
It took about seven weeks to tension all the cables, with the bridge being progressively lifted off the temporary support columns during the process.
The bridge deck is made up of 88 massive concrete segments each weighing between 70 and 140 tonnes.
The delicate engineering operation to put them in place occurred seven metres above ground and mainly at night, resulting in minimal disruption to local traffic.
More than 4,600 people worked on the skytrain project.
The Windsor Road bridge was a design solution to community feedback which means any future upgrade of the Windsor Road and Schofields Road intersection will not be impacted by the new metro railway.
The four kilometre skytrain from Bella Vista to Rouse Hill will allow people and cars to move around freely underneath and avoid the physical division that often comes with railway lines.
