New Luas works to start in weeks

Work on the cross-city Luas line, Luas BXD, which will link the existing Red and Green lines through Dublin city centre, is to start within weeks.

The Railway Procurement Agency (RPA) plans to break ground on the project in the week beginning June 24th, with the identification and filling in of cellars on the historic city centre streets along the route. Just 25 of a potential 400 vaulted cellars associated with the city's Georgian buildings have so far been identified.

The work will involve digging narrow trenches adjacent to the kerbside at 30m intervals to establish the position, extent and condition of the cellars, before they are filled where necessary with a foam and concrete mix. The streets most likely to be affected are Dawson, Westmoreland, Parnell, Marlborough and Dominick streets. In many instances the original buildings connected to these cellars have long since been demolished, the RPA said .

The cellars need to be filled to eliminate “voids” in order to ensure the stability of the line, but also to provide a new area to lay utility pipes which are currently in the centre of roadways and would be directly under where the tracks must be laid. The cellar works and the diversion of pipes must be completed ahead of the laying of the track, which is due to start in early 2015.

The full cellar works are expected to take six to eight months and to continue until February 2014. However, the RPA said it hoped to spend no more than 10 to 15 days outside any property and would run the work concurrently on the applicable streets to minimise disruption. “Keeping the streets open for traffic, commuters, shoppers and business is of paramount importance for the project so there will be no road closures during the cellar works phase,” a spokeswoman for the project said. There will, however, be restrictions and some space limitations on kerbs.

Archaeological assessment and excavation of the cellars will be carried out and the cellars will be “preserved by record”, the RPA said.

The 5.6km line from St Stephen’s Green to Broombridge in Cabra is due to be completed in 2017 and is expected to add 10 million passengers a year to the Luas system. The existing lines carried 30 million passengers last year.