NEW RAILWAY STATION.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXV, Issue 20071, 8 October 1928, Page 11

NEW RAILWAY STATION.

LAYING THE FOUNDATION. NINE HUNDRED PILES DRIVEN. HULKS OF OLD VESSELS. Good progress is being made with the preliminary work in connection with the erection of the new railway station in Auckland. Operations were commenced last June, and when the task is completed in January, 1930, tlie sum of £330,000 will have been spent in erecting a model railway station. Two hundred men are employed with pick and shovel, hammer and saw, and the powerful inventions of scientific engineers, moving among the scattered jumblo of things with that impassive swiftness which characterises an industrious army of zealous workers. On this piece of land, reclaimed from the sea, they have laboured for four months fashioning the earth into shapo and reinforcing it to hold firm the thousands of tons of weight it will ho required to carry when tho new building has beon completed Reinforced concreto piles, weighing between five and six tons, aro driven into the ground until 4ft. of earth covers tho tops of them. Approximately 1300 piles will bo sunk on the site to form a foundation. To accomplish this task a semiautomatic hammer is used. Only two minutes aro occupied in driving a 50ft. pile into the earth, and already 900 piles havo been set down. Much time is taken in shifting and hoisting tho huge hammer, sometimes an hour and a-half being necessary to place the machine in position. Scoria is about sft. thick above the tide lovel, below which is mud and then the flint-liko rock into which tho piles aro forced. Seven hundred piles will bo under the building and about 600 beneath tho four 90-foot platforms, when the work is completed.

Heavy iron girders and plates, rusted and old, which at one time formed part of ships, long since broken up, are causing some little difficulty in pile-driving. Twenty and thirty Feet below the surface of this strip of reclaimed land odd portions from the hulks of rotted vessels lie, and when it is discovered that they are rosting in such a place as to prevent the pile penetrating straight down to the rock, they have to be unearthed. Thrown on top of the ground now are three or four weighty iron girders, which wore unearthed by excavators. . While gangs of men are engaged in this work, others are employed in sHittincr thousands of cubic yards of spoil and tipping it within two long retaining walls of concrete, strengthened with rods of iron. In this way the foundation for he traffic roads leading to and from the station is being laid. The graded concrete walls which can now be seen from Anzac Avenue and Beach Road, mark tho roads which will encircle the building. So far six thousand tons of spoil have been dumped within the walls and before the ronds are finished another 12.000 tons of spoil will be needed. It will then be sealed and perfect thoroughfares created. Up to to-day men have built over a thousand feet of concrete retaining walls, which will contain the spoil to form the roads. Carpenters and labourers comprise the majority of men employed at present on the job. With the laying 61 tho foundation and the commencement of the erection of the railway station itself, scores of skilled stonemasons, bricklayers, plasterers. plumbers and ironworkers will join the small army of toilers.