Passenger Trains > Brightline’s track construction (little used technique)

The multibillion-dollar job of building track from Orlando to South Florida for Brightline’s high-speed passenger rail has been earthshaking.
 
Or so it seemed in Orlando recently at one of the most unique and surprising construction works in the nation. 
 
“You feel that? We are moving,” said Scott Gammon, Brightline’s senior vice president for construction. “We are riding 6,000 tons.”
 
He was standing in the middle of Goldenrod Road just south of the Beachline Expressway near the northeast corner of Orlando International Airport. Beneath his boots was a slab of concrete that was the top of a box being pushed into place by hydraulic jacks.
 
That box, to serve as a tunnel for a pair of Brightline tracks, is 272 feet long, 30 feet tall and 43 feet wide. It weighs 13,748,194 pounds, or nearly as much as 393,000 concrete blocks, which, if stacked on top of each other, would tower 49 miles high.
 
Concrete tunnels usually are big and heavy. What’s different about the one at Goldenrod is that it was built on a temporary construction yard. It was then slid, despite its mammoth heft, nearly the length of a football field to a permanent position a few feet beneath the road’s surface, all to significantly reduce construction time.
 
https://www.orlandosentinel.com/news/transportation/os-ne-brightline-tunnel-construction-20200917-cj66ylrgafah7dlb6iiuekatye-story.html
 

I believe they used the box in construction of the underpass for the 528 interchange in Cocoa,too.   There was a video by the Roaming Railfan a few weeks ago in which he chronicled it from his drone.

Lackawanna484 Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> I believe they used the box in construction of the
> underpass for the 528 interchange in
> Cocoa,too.   There was a video by the Roaming
> Railfan a few weeks ago in which he chronicled it
> from his drone.

According to the story, they haven’t started yet, but it is on the agenda:

 
The construction has been a rehearsal for a larger, more demanding repeat next year. Brightline must also get its train under the Beachline Expressway in Brevard County.
 
Unlike with Goldenrod Road, the Beachline can’t be closed entirely for any length of time. Constructed from three sections, the box there will be bigger than the one used for Goldenrod and it will be installed while traffic passes over.
 
 

More about the box jacking technique on BrightLine.

https://www.constructiondive.com/news/brightline-shaves-almost-a-year-from-florida-rail-project-using-precast-tun/584711/

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