Saturday, March 22, 2008

New U-Bahn Station

I (and 35 other engineers) recently had a chance to tour the new Brandenburg Gate U-Bahn station that is currently in construction. The tunnel away from this location towards the main train station is completed. The other direction toward Alexander Platz under Unten den Linden Street will be dug over the next ten years, so this station will be the end terminus of this line for a decade or so. This station will be finished in a year, with the train only running "pendulum style" through one of the two tunnels for the first few years to the Main Station, 5 minutes away.
Interesting to note is that the ground in Berlin is a sandy swamp, difficult and wet. To make it all easier for construction they actually injected refrigerator pipes here and froze the land so they could excavate it like an ice block! A first for Germany.