Six slipform pavers rebuild Europe’s largest construction site
It was Europe’s largest job site: when building the Inn Canal in the 1920s, 43 excavators, 115 locomotives, 7,000 workers and 38 million hours were needed to process 400,000 m³ of concrete. The 20 km long headrace canal is still supplying the turbines of the Inn power station even today, but was in dire need of rehabilitation. Modern slipform paving methods, however, enabled the job to be completed much more economically than 80 years ago.
As many as six slipform pavers from Wirtgen rose to the challenge. The rehabilitation was to be carried out in accordance with the principles of concrete road construction. Using the so-called overlay method, an additional 15 cm thick layer was to be paved on top of the existing concrete trough. That was no problem at all on the flat canal floor, but was quite a different matter on the canal’s embankments with their steep slope of 40 degrees. Special embankment pavers working in conjunction with the SP 500 slipform pavers were used for this job. After the initial phase, the construction gang achieved production rates of 1,600 m³ per shift, supported by numerous machines, conveyors and excavators. In a final operation, the large SP 1600 slipform paver lined the canal floor with 85,000 m³ of special concrete.