A Masterpiece of Engineering Design

Important milestone reached in the Stuttgart 21 railway project: On 12 March 2022, the 20th of a total of 28 chalice pillars was concreted in Stuttgart’s new main station. This so-called special cup has a prominent position compared to the other cup supports. It forms one of the entrances and exits of the future main station, which is why a lift and an escalator lead through it. In addition, it sits on a platform which, at this point, bridges the suburban railway tunnel below it. The special cup and the new platforms next to it rest on a specially built underground prestressed concrete bridge. This ensures that the lower-lying main line of the Stuttgart S-Bahn does not experience any load or contact from the special cup and the new platforms. “The planning of the new main station led us as the responsible engineers into completely new territory. The chalice supports in particular are an absolute novelty. Only a few years ago, very few people believed that such a complex geometry could be executed with such high precision and quality. The concreting of the special chalice impressively shows what structural design at the highest level makes possible,” says our company founder Werner Sobek. We are therefore all the more pleased about the praise from project architect Christoph Ingenhoven: “The engineering technology used here is at the very highest level in a global comparison”.

Here you will find a film about the concreting of the special chalice.