Significant steps takenRailway and Schiphol Airport station update

These past weeks, the Major Maintenance Schiphol (Groot Onderhoud Schiphol, GOS) project spent 224 hours working in one of the two railway tunnels beneath Schiphol. Construction manager at ProRail Johan van der Velden: ‘Beneath Schiphol is an old tunnel tube and a new one. We’re upgrading both. This time, we were working in the old tube. The other railway tunnel remained open so that Schiphol would still be accessible by train.’ A lot of work was done to update the railway: ‘In the tunnel we removed the old railway track and the structure it was attached to. We used special machines to do that. After removing the old railway we installed an innovative sleeper track. It was specially developed for this project and for the Schiphol Tunnel. This new sleeper track allowed us to raise the railway and it requires less maintenance, which is good news for train travellers.’

The Multimodal Hub Schiphol (Multimodale Knoop Schiphol, MKS) project is simultaneously carrying out works at Schiphol Airport station. Erwin de Boer, construction manager at ProRail, is happy with the result: ‘We removed two moving walkways, on schedule. They’re being replaced by a fixed stairway. This will create more room on the platforms. That’s important because of the growing number of train travellers.’

Although we worked really hard, neither project is complete. Johan: ‘We’re continuing in November and December, for three consecutive weeks this time. We’re going to replace the railway track where the platforms are. This will be a tough job because a lot of noise will be produced on some days. We’ve prepared for this well with soundproofing measures, but travellers are definitely going to notice that we are at work. But in order to keep Schiphol accessible, it needs to be done.’ Further work will be done on the moving walkways too.