Building the Rooftop for South Nanjing Station

October 12th, construction department of South Nanjing Station disclosed that, rooftop construction for South Nanjing Station, which equals to the area of 13 standard football fields started. 11 meshwork structure will be put together at the height of 40m and 4 air-tracks will slide to designed positions on the rooftop from the south to the north, then forming the complete rooftop covering meshwork structure. The first slippage will be done on 22nd of October. The whole rooftop installation will cost at least more than 3 months.

As a pivot station connecting 5 high-level railways, South Nanjing Station is 6 times bigger than the current Nanjing Station. After completion, it will become the biggest railway pivot station in Asia, said Wu Julong, deputy chief engineer of China Construction Industrial Equipment Installation Co., Ltd. As the major steel structure of station buildings are completed, the coming key project is building the rooftop .

Rooftop of South Nanjing Station consists of two layers: inner layer is meshwork structure; outer layer is roof panels consisting of heat preservation layer and waterproof layer. Since the span of rooftop of South Nanjing Station is big, the roof weighs as much as 8,000 tons.

Technical personnel expressed that, the meshwork structure is connected by large number of steel rod parts, weighing 8,000 tons more. Such a big and difficult meshwork structure at height is rare in China. So it is a challenging task to install the meshwork onto corresponding positions on the roof after being assembled on the elevated platform.

the assembled meshwork will slide to corresponding positions from the south to the north on 4 special air-tracks and form into the whole rooftop cover, Wu explained. They resort to existing vertical columns in the station building to set up 4 air-tracks of 320m long, then slide each unit meshwork to a certain position.