GH participates in the work to extend line 6 of the São Paulo metro in collaboration with ACCIONA

Last April we installed a GH Bridge Crane in the São Paulo metro extension works being carried out by Acciona in this city of more than 12 million inhabitants. In the following video we show how it was transported from our factory in Cabreúva and installed in the PUC Cardoso Station, located in the centre of São Paulo.

The Spanish company Acciona is carrying out the works to extend line 6 of the São Paulo metro. The extension has a length of fifteen kilometres and will have fifteen new stations. It is estimated that it will serve 600,000 – 800,000 people each day.

For this important infrastructure project, the largest currently underway in Latin America following the public-private collaboration model, Acciona has awarded the contract for the supply of three bridge cranes to GH. The crane featured in the video is already installed at the PUC Cardoso Station and the other two will be used in the area for manufacturing and handling precast segments.

The installation of the GH Bridge Crane at the PUC Cardoso Station was carried out during the first half of April 2022. It is a Special Bridge Crane 35 metres long, 14 metres high and with a tonnage of 30t. Twenty workers from GH Brazil participated in its manufacture.

The transportation of the Bridge Crane from the GH Brazil factory in Cabreúva to the PUC Cardoso Station was coordinated with the São Paulo Department of Traffic Management. The journey, which involved a distance of fifty kilometres, was carried out in two shifts. First, the motorway section was covered in a two-hour trip. Once in the city, the trucks waited until midnight to travel the remaining distance to the site. The girders were unloaded and hoisted that same night, since the operation had to be completed before five in the morning.

The complete assembly of the GH Special Bridge Crane took nine days, plus an extra day of testing. It involved the active participation of six people. The Bridge Crane is installed over a shaft with a diameter of 34 metres and a depth of 80 metres, and its main function is to remove the debris from the drilling of the shaft itself, as well as to lower heavy machinery to the bottom.

One of the challenges of this complex operation was carrying it out in such a way that the metro extension works suffered as little downtime as possible. For this reason, both the transport and the assembly of the GH Bridge Crane were carried out in record time.

It should also be noted that, compared to the use of tower cranes, this special GH solution brings much higher levels of productivity, safety and precision to the Acciona project.  In addition, thanks to the acoustic material used to cover the enclosure that protects the trolley, noise has been significantly reduced, thus minimising the disturbance caused to neighbours during the work in progress, which continues 24 hours a day.