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A retail mall is constructed below a busy century old railway station in Toronto
Union Station is Toronto's primary multi-modal transportation hub accommodating commuter rail operations for GO Transit and intercity rail operations for VIA Rail. The station currently handles over 42 million passengers annually and this flow is likely to double over the next 10 to 20 years.
The head house was built by 1919 and the station became operational in the late 1920s after the viaduct structure was completed.
The project undertaken by NORR is the largest intervention in the station's history and has the objectives of improving and expanding the facilities; providing significant heritage restoration to a designated Canadian National Historic site and expanding the commercial retail occupancy. The City of Toronto ‘Dig Down' major component of the project entails building a retail mall below the entire viaduct structure and parts of the head house. To achieve that an ambitious project involving support of the track slab while the station continues to operate, excavation, replacement of existing foundations, extension of columns down to rock and building an intermediate concourse level was planned and is underway.
The new project will conserve and extend the life of the building for many more decades, by retrofitting the old, strengthening the overall structure and responding to the new functions of a modern day train station with an adjoining retail mall.
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