Hamilton Transit Centre’s new facility will perform three functions: bus dispatch, bus service (fuel and wash), and bus maintenance. Buses and bus operators servicing the Richmond, New Westminster, Burnaby, and Vancouver areas will begin and complete service from this location.
This 7.3 hectare site will support the operations and maintenance of a fleet of 300 40-foot equivalent buses, including up to 80 Community Shuttle buses and 150 compressed natural gas fuelled buses. Sixty-foot buses will also be accommodated at the centre.
HTC features a maintenance building, service delivery building, waste water treatment building, bus washing building, and fuelling building.
This project stepped Smith Sheet Metal Works Ltd. up into a new level of project size and scope.
We were happily partnered up with Dual Mechanical, Aarc West Insulation, and Stasis Balancing.
It was supposed to be built one building at a time, but that quickly changed to a fast track of all buildings at the same time. Fortunately, we were able to put multiple crews on each building and with the skill of our site foreman Mike Stark we were able to accommodate the new compressed schedule.
These buildings focused heavily on exhaust systems. We had a wide range of exhaust types along with the matching make up air systems. The extensive list includes stainless steel exhaust canopy over massive parts washing bay, stainless steel bus exhaust canopies that the buses would drive under for general exhaust, and multiple 50-foot-long fuel bay stainless exhaust canopies.
The company was also responsible for bus wash exhaust systems, a huge bus spray booth exhaust and make up air system, and dust collection systems. Nedermen retractable welding exhaust arms connect to a vacuum and filter system, removing the contaminants from the extracted air so that it can be returned to the atmosphere without negative effects. The sytem also includes a Nedermen hose reels c/w automatic fan operation.
A lot of these systems were connected to very large exhaust ducts, which are normally not a big deal, but due to the size of the buses that happen to be lifted into the air, all of the ducting had to be fitted into the exposed roof trusses. This caused a need for an extensive amount of site co-ordination between trades that normally like to run their own pipes in that space as well.
Many of these systems required exposed stainless steel ducting; fortunately, we have a lot of experience in this area, and after several months of non-stop tig welding we were able to deliver a very nice product for the customer.
One of the large components of the ducting systems were the spiral pipes. We had miles of it to install, and due to the exposed locations and customer profile we decided to partner up with ECCO Supply and install a large amount of matching spiral elbows which really made the systems look terrific.
In addition to this we took care of all of the office air conditioning ducts, lunch facility, gym systems, general exhaust, and stainless steel boiler venting.
Overall this was a project that Smith Sheet Metal tackled with confidence and successfully delivered on time. Visit www.smithsheetmetalworks.ca for more information.
