Skanska USA Civil Northeast constructed a train maintenance shopand separate car washer facility for this $168 million design-build contract. The buildings service, clean and maintain New York City Transit's #7 Line railcars.
The project team, which was led by Skanska, also includes subsidiary, Skanska Mechanical and Structural. The scope of work included design and construction of a three-story, 100,000-square-foot maintenance shop and 7,200-square-foot car washer facility as well as a two-story, 1,200-square-foot signal relay building and two circuit-breaker houses located west of the maintenance facility. To prevent schedule delays, the project team devised the solution of building a temporary car washer off the mainline track in an area west of where construction of the permanent facilities was taking place. This enabled the client to have a fully functioning car washer on the premises while workers built a new one in the same location as the original. For the buildings' foundations, Underpinning and Foundation Skanska drove 1,400 18-inch-diameter taper tube piles into the ground to improve the supportive qualities of the soil. The team then placed footings with a thick concrete mat slab to support the various structures. Construction of the maintenance building and car washer facility as well as the other ancillary buildings occured simultaneously.
The three-story steel-and-concrete maintenance shop - designed to service up to 400 rail cars - houses numerous pieces of sophisticated maintenance equipment, including a wheel-truing machine with a progression system, an overhead bridge crane, a compressed air system, an industrial waste system, and computerized vertical storage system. To make the building environmentally friendly, numerous skylights were installed in the roof allowing natural sunlight to enter the building. Motion sensors were also installed to control lights in the facility. A photovoltaic panel system put on the roof generates 100Kw of power along with a fuel cell that generates 200Kw of power.
Skanska installed all equipment for the power and signal installations and constructed 12,000 linear feet of rail leading to and from the maintenance and car washer facilities. The team also performed the procurement, installation, testing and commissioning of all the high-tech mechanical and electrical systems. This facility is New York City Transit’s first LEED certified maintenance shop.
