The future of Confederation GO Station is beginning to take shape, including now reaching a significant project development phase.

The construction tender for the station in east Hamilton, Ont., has now been made public – officially setting off the bidding process to do all the heavy lifting.

Now let’s take a look at what it will all add up to – as well as all the work that has taken place to get to this point.

Confederation GO rail station will offer a number of essential customer amenities, including an accessible island platform with tunnel connections and canopies, a passenger pick-up and drop-off area and direct stair access from Centennial Parkway. It will also offer approximately 150 additional parking spaces.

As we’ve previously reported, recent efforts have focussed on providing more service to West Harbour station in Hamilton. But over the past few years, Metrolinx has been incrementally completing major infrastructure milestones that will allow for a full scale GO station to function at the Confederation site.

Niko Barlas, project manager with Metrolinx’s Capital Projects Group, will be leading the boots-on-the-ground team in charge of construction of the station itself and building on the work that has already been completed.

“Metrolinx has been involved with this site for a couple of years now and it has its challenges, both in terms of access and the fact that it spans across a live rail corridor,“ Barlas explained.

Site enabling works wrapped up in 2018

“We essentially laid down a lot of the ground work south of the rail corridor as part of that first phase.”

That work included connecting all necessary site services, extended culverts and worked with corridor owners, CN, to install fibre optic cable.

“We also installed a major section of the cast-in-place tunnel and will now finish that tunnel as part of this new contract,” Barlas said.

The enabling work also included demolition of existing buildings, and extensive site clearing, grubbing and grading. You can see some of that toiling in these images.

A brand new Park ‘N’ Ride opened in November 2019

Meanwhile, on the north side of the tracks, the Metrolinx GO Bus Infrastructure team built a bus loop with shelters and approximately 60 parking spaces as a separate project. The work also involved extensive work on underground utilities, a new storm water chamber, as well as landscaping and tree planting.

Treating this as a separate project allowed Metrolinx to open this section of the site independently of the rest of the station. The Park ‘N’ Ride is now serviced by GO Bus Route 12, in place of the stop previously located at Nash Road North and Barton Street East, and multiple HSR Bus routes.

In the future, this infrastructure will tie into the new station and connect GO Bus and HSR services with GO train service.

CN expanded the Centennial Parkway Bridge in October 2019

Metrolinx worked with CN – rail partners and the corridor owners – to add four new spans to the rail bridge over Centennial Parkway, immediately east of the station site.

Niko pointed to the importance of this work, explaining: “The wider bridge gives us the space to install additional track on it to service the future station – it really is key to unlocking this site’s potential.

“We are looking forward to breaking ground on the new station as soon as possible.”

The construction tender for Confederation station was made public today and the precise construction schedule will be finalized when the contract is awarded this summer.

Any further expansion of this station will be based on demand and ridership growth.

Metrolinx continues to work with CN on the required infrastructure investments and long-term agreements required for further service expansion into Hamilton.