When completed, the A1 motorway will run straight through Poland. The motorway will be used by a tremendous amount of heavy traffic, as alternatives are currently limited to more or less well developed country roads. The upper pavement structure will therefore need to be extremely stable, and high demands were additionally placed on the environmental compatibility of the construction machinery used. When building the first, 90 km long section, the contractors relied on machines from Wirtgen, Vögele and Hamm for paving the various layers from the subgrade all the way to the asphalt surface course.
Vögele pavers of the latest machine generation took on paving of the upper pavement layers on Europe’s largest job site. On numerous sections, paving of the 20 cm thick gravel base layer was completed by three pavers type Super 1900-2, equipped with paving screeds type AB 600 TP2 and working at a paving width of 8.50 m each. A special feature when paving the coarse-grained material: All pavers compacted the gravel layer with their high-density TP2 screeds, each of which is equipped with one tamper and two pressure bars. Following the excellent pre-compaction achieved by the pavers, final compaction was then carried out to perfection by two tandem rollers of the HD series and one pneumatic tyred roller type GRW 10 from Hamm.
Paving gangs consisting of two tracked and one wheeled paver from Vögele were in action along the entire section of road, paving two base layers of 7.5 cm thickness each, a binder course of 8 cm, and a surface course of 3.5 cm thickness consisting of stone mastic asphalt, all of which were then compacted by Hamm rollers. To do so, groups of rollers were formed, their operating weights finely attuned to the work to be performed. Each group consisted of one tandem roller HD 120 from Hamm with an operating weight of 12 tons, co-operating with between two and four rollers type HD O 90 V or HD O 75 V, and one DV 70 VO.
The machines from Hamm and Vögele are facing a tremendous task: Upon completion of the asphalt paving operation on the first 90-km long section, the forty pavers and rollers will have processed an impressive total quantity of some 1,600,000 tons of asphalt mix.