DenverInfill Blog

News about the bus terminal floor is so yesterday. Construction of the walls is underway! Okay, so the floor isn’t finished, and it’s still an exciting part of the project. And it may be a while before any concrete is poured for the walls.  Still, seeing the project go vertical for the first time is worth our attention.  Here are pictorial updates of both parts of the project.

In the first photo above, you can see that six sections of the floor have been poured, bringing the total to date to about 7,000 cubic yards of concrete.  The seventh pour is in progress right now.  As you see in the second photo above, the first two forms for the concrete walls were put in place on Thursday afternoon and more may be added today.  Assembled forms are laying along the side of the hole.  It seems to take a few days to build one form but only a few hours to install it.

Also of note is significant, new work on the light rail passenger platform.  The first photo below shows the platform canopy at the existing passenger station between Wewatta Street and Union Station.  The second photo shows 14 foundations that will support a similar platform canopy at the new light rail station between the Consolidate Main Line (freight tracks) and the bus terminal.  Placement of the station is now obvious for the first time.  About half of it will be in the 17th Street view plane, and the other half will extend behind Glass House.  For the sake of comparison, there are 13 posts supporting the existing canopy so it seems that the new canopy will be slightly longer than the old one.  Here’s a peek at what the new canopy might look like.  From a distance of 200 feet above, it appears that each foundation is about 10 feet square and about three feet thick.  If a bus terminal can float, I guess a light rail canopy can fly; therefore, you need hefty foundations for both.

Please see our Denver Union Station page at JobSiteVistor.com for 20 photos added this week.

The second concrete pour was done on Friday. I was fortunate to get into the job site to get some close-up photos of the  pour and of the elaborate rebar structure that has been built over the past few weeks.

The photo below is a close shot of the pouring process.  The vertical, black tube coming down from the center is the hose of the concrete pumper that is behind me.  Notice the worker in the blue hard hat.  He is controlling the movement of the boom with a joy stick on a control panel at his waist.  The panel is supported by straps around his shoulders and back.

Below is a photo of the machine you can see in the photo above.  It is used to spread and level the concrete.  There is a plow of the side opposite the operator.  Notice the two vertical rods on each side of the plow.  At the top of those rods are GPS devices that enable the operator to level the concrete at a precise elevation.

This photo of concrete trucks helps to give some scale to the shoring wall.

Here are a couple of shots of workers in a sea of rebar.  The photos demonstrate the depth of the floor and the density of the rebar.  In the photo on the left, you can see dark-colored (raw steel) rebar along the bottom.  The top layer of rebar and the vertical supports are coated with epoxy which makes them green.  Notice in the foreground of the photo on the right how the rebar is tied at the intersections.   That work is done by 8-10 people bending at the waist all day.  (Talk about flexible hamstrings!)

While most of the work is focused on the bus terminal floor, other workers are preparing for the walls.  This photo shows two forms staged along the side of the hole.  Several other forms have been built and are staged elsewhere on the site.  For scale, notice the portable toilet in the background.

Over the weekend, I posted 16 more photos to our Denver Union Station page at JobSiteVistor in addition to four that I posted during the middle of last week.  All of the newest ones were taken from inside the jobsite.

And, finally, here’s a guy who is pretending to be important (me).

Here is the scene at the Union Station redevelopment site at about 8:00am today.

This is the first pour of concrete for the bus terminal floor.  It is something akin to a practice run in preparation for a larger scale effort on Friday.  As I write this, a second concrete pumper is being set up on the opposite side of the hole.

I expect to get some on-site, ground-level photos on Friday and post another blog around the middle of the day.  In the meantime, you can keep up to date on this week’s activity by checking our Denver Union Station page at JobSiteVistor.com.  I will post more photos throughout the rest of the week.

This Union Station update is about rebar and concrete.  Plenty of both.  Construction of the bus terminal floor is in full swing.

Multiple flatbed tractor trailers show up each day with loads of rebar.  Much of it is 60-foot long #10.  At 1.25 inches in diameter and 4.3 pounds per foot, each piece weighs 258 pounds.  Now I know why it takes three guys to carry one piece.

After the rebar is unloaded and staged, the crane “flies” it into the specific work spot at a rate of 2.5 tons per flight.  The base level of rebar is the typical steel color.  Vertical pieces of green rebar are shaped like an upside-down V.  Straight, green pieces are tied to the top of the vertical pieces to form a giant three-dimensional grid. The sheets of membrane that are being installed over the mud slab and under the rebar will adhere to the bottom of the new concrete floor making the terminal water proof.  Here are a couple of photos.

Starting as early as next week, concrete will be poured in 15 sections of varying lengths and widths.  Each of the 15 sections will require 100-140 truck loads of concrete to fill it to its full depth of four feet.   That’s about 2,000 trucks of concrete!  The floor needs to be four feet thick so it can bear the weight of the buses and the structure above, and so the bus terminal won’t float once the dewatering system is dismantled and the water table resumes its normal level.  (I guess if you can float an aircraft carrier, you can float a bus terminal.)  Roadways in and around the construction site are being beefed up and dressed, presumably in anticipation of heavy concrete truck traffic.

Construction of the bus terminal walls is expected to start this month.  In fact, in the upper left corner of the close-up photo above, you can see vertical rebar rising above the floor level.

Remember, this is only half of the eventual bus terminal.  Excavation has not yet started on the Union Station side of Wewatta Street.

If you want to express your opinion of the bridge formerly known at Kinetic Plaza, you should attend the Planning Board meeting tomorrow (August 4) at 3:00pm at the Webb Municipal Office Building, Room 4.F.6.  Here is a link to my blog and your comments on the topic.

Please see our Denver Union Station page at JobSiteVistor.com for 12 new photos this week.

Here is the most recent Union Station urban design submission to the planning board.  Anne Hayes, who is Chairperson of Union Station Advocates and Vice President and Project Manager for Westfield Development Company, was kind enough to send it to me.  It focuses on three elements of the redevelopment plan:

1. The canopy connector between the train hall and Union Station.
2. The pedestrian bridge that connects Lodo with Central Platte Valley over the Amtrak and commuter rail tracks (formerly known as Kinetic Plaza).
3. The grand staircase at Wynkoop Plaza.

While the design of the canopy connector seems to be acceptable to all or most parties, the updated design of the pedestrian bridge appears to be causing some heartburn. In fact, at its April 28 meeting, the planning board sent the design team back to the drawing board.  The original design called for a grand public space with public art and plenty of room for tables where it connected to a proposed adjacent building on the Central Platte Valley side on the tracks.  With that building now in question, the new bridge design is far more utilitarian and has lost all of its public space features.   See pages 8 and 9 in the link above for renderings of the current bridge design.  The August 4 planning board meeting should bring the bridge issue to an interesting conclusion.

(See July 22 update below)

Cheyenne Frontier Days must be upon us. Steam engine 844 and the rest of Union Pacific’s historic train is pulling into Union Station as I write this.

In past years, the train has backed into the tracks behind the station and broken itself into two pieces such that the front half parks on one set of tracks and the back half on another set.  This year, there is only one set of tracks.  As you know from previous DenverInfill blogs, the other tracks have been removed as part of the Union Station redevelopment project.

Amtrak’s California Zephyr is due to arrive in a few hours from Chicago.  Hmmm.  Where it will park?

Next year, it will be even more challenging.  All the tracks behind the station will be gone and Amtrak will be using its temporary terminal on the other side of 20th Street.  Hmmm.  Where will 844 park?

I am dashing off on my bike to take a few photos.  I will add them to this post when I return.

July 22, 1:55pm update:

Finally, here is a photo (another appears on Jobsite Visitor and more will follow).  A technical glitch prevented me from posting it earlier.

Shortly after taking that photo yesterday afternoon, the train pulled away and parked about a half mile to the northeast, out of sight of Union Station.  It returns to Union Station on Friday (today) and Sunday for public display from 10am to 8pm each day.  Union Pacific and Amtrak appear to be well coordinated on the use of the limited track space behind the station.

Current activity is all about building foundations for the bus terminal and the light rail station.

First, let’s look at the bus terminal.  The six-inch-thick concrete mud slab is expanding through the area occupied by the foundations for the two escalators and the elevator.  The water-proof membrane is being installed over the portion of the mud slab that was poured last week.  Likewise, rebar is being installed over the membrane.

I’ll try to decipher the photo below that I took from the eighth floor of Glass House.  To the right is the bare concrete mud slab.  The dark area against the shoring wall is concrete covered by the membrane, which is covered by a very dense amount of rebar.  Between the rebar area and the bare concrete is the area covered only with the membrane.  It’s identifiable by the light-colored grid.  Work on the concrete, membrane, and rebar is continuing.

Considering the size of the rebar (it takes three men to carry one piece of it) and the fact that the floor will be four feet thick, it appears that the foundation will be a pretty solid.

Now for the light rail station.  This part of the project is far less dramatic in scope than the bus terminal, but vital nonetheless.  The following photo is from the Millennium Bridge and shows that the station  foundations are now approaching the Union Gateway Bridge (in the background).  The ground surface will be raised to the tops of the concrete foundations/walls.  Then the tracks can be laid, and the passenger platform can be built.

I’ve uploaded 13 new photos to our Denver Union Station page at JobSiteVistor.com so far this week.  I expect more will follow as progress becomes visible.