While it will still be several more years until trains begin running along the western leg of the Valley Line LRT, a major part of the construction is complete.
A stretch of the line includes a two-kilometre long elevated section along 87 Avenue from 163 Street to 182 Street, which includes two stations at West Edmonton Mall and Misericordia Hospital.
The contractor building the western leg, Marigold Infrastructure Partners, says all of the concrete segments are now in place for the raised tracks — thanks to a specialized crane brought in from the other side of the world.
Marigold said the massive, 400-tonne gantry crane has been instrumental in completing that section of the LRT line.
The two-kilometer-long concrete elevated section of track for the Valley Line West LRT by West Edmonton Mall is now complete, and the giant gantry crane is coming down. Wednesday, October 8, 2025.
Global News
Through modular construction, the gantry crane hoisted 60-tonne pre-cast concrete segments into place. The segments were then joined together with a high-strength epoxy and pulled tight by high-strength tensioning cables, then carefully placed onto the piers below.
The concrete segments were pre-cast off site in Red Deer, which Marigold said increased the quality since it’s a controlled environment.
“This approach reduces the amount of time to install the spans on site and therefore reduces impacts to the community,” said Zane Lazerus, senior construction engineer with Marigold.
“Since the beginning of April, we installed 224 precast concrete segments in just under 180 days, which is great production for us. We’re really proud of it,” Lazerus said.
“The total weight of that concrete is 10.2 million kg that we erected this season. We had over 40 heavy lift operations that went successfully. ”
As the work on the elevated track progressed from east to west, traffic below was affected in different ways.
“We had three separate traffic patterns that everybody was able to figure out,” Lazerus said.
The elevated tracks allow traffic along the 170 Street major transportation corridor, as well as vehicles to the west of 178 Street, to flow unimpeded by the LRT.
“The traffic below was a real consideration and so without the gantry, it would have been very difficult to build this type of guideway structure through a busy portion of Edmonton,” Lazerus said.
Brian Latte, the city’s director for the Valley Line West, said west Edmonton’s skyline has been transformed forever.
“It’s like a huge milestone,” Latte said of the stretch of elevated track being in place. “It was a very complicated piece of infrastructure that was built. So to have that behind us is a big, big positive for the project. ”
Rendering of the Valley Line LRT west Misercordia Hospital station.
Credit: City of Edmonton
The elevated tracks mean the southern entrances to West Edmonton Mall and the Misericordia Community Hospital were not affected as much during construction or going forward.
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“There are other ways to have done it, and they are… not awesome for traffic, is probably the best way to say it,” Lazerus said. “In all likelihood, if we had not used the gantry, we would have had serious road impacts, business impacts that we were able to avoid by bringing this piece of equipment.
“In the end and we had a really successful season with our gantry crane.”
It took a crew of 14 people to operate the gantry crane and Marigold said highly skilled tradespeople from all over the world came to Edmonton to run the specialized equipment, which came from Dubai.
While the majority of the crew is local, Lazerus said they were joined by some experts with extensive experience in segmental bridge construction projects around the world.
“They put in a lot of long days this season,” Lazerus said. “We were working six days a week, sometimes seven days a week — 12 to 14 hours a day, to make sure that we were getting everything done on the project schedule.
“It’s just (a) really impressive push.”
Marigold said the gantry crane will now be dismantled over the next five or so weeks and put into storage. It’s not yet known where the crane is headed next.
While the concrete structure is complete, Marigold said there is still a lot of work left to do to complete the overall LRT line, including the overhead catenary system (OCS), walkways, railings and constructing the West Edmonton Mall and Misericordia Hospital train stations.
Valley Line West road closure updates
The Valley Line construction will continue to affect drivers in the west end, especially those who travel along the train track’s alignment.
The City of Edmonton said the intersection of Stony Plain Road and 149 Street reopened to traffic on Oct. 7, about a week ahead of schedule. The intersection was partially closed to vehicle traffic on Aug. 15, as part of the Valley Line West’s accelerated roadwork plan.
The intersection of 95 Avenue and 156 Street also reopened to traffic on Oct. 3.
Accelerated roadwork continues along 104 Avenue between 105 Street and 121 Street.
The city said the work has reduced 104 Avenue to one lane eastbound and one lane westbound. This work is anticipated to continue for the remainder of the construction season.
The three-phased accelerated roadwork plan began in April, with the goal of getting the majority of the roads along the Valley Line West alignment into their final configuration by the end of 2025.
It meant more complete intersection closures over keeping traffic flowing around road work, to the despair of local businesses who saw customer traffic drop.
“We certainly recognize it’s been a really tough slog for those businesses,” Latte said. “They’ve had to sort of put up with quite a few years of disruption.
“This year, most of the road, if not all the road work, will be done.”
The city said all intersection work was completed on or ahead of schedule. Now that the elevated track is done, the 87 Avenue below it needs to be rebuilt.
“That work will happen for the most part next year. We’ll try to see what we can do to minimize the traffic disruptions on it, but again, it won’t be as significant,” Latte said.
The goal for Valley Line West construction to be done is sometime in 2028.
When it opens will be determined after an extensive testing and commissioning phase, such as what happened with the southeastern leg of the LRT between downtown and Mill Woods.
That segment of the Valley Line was built by a different P3 company called TransEd.
“We’ve got to tie the southeast and the west together. So there’s a lot of complicated integration work that has to happen once the construction’s done,” Latte said.
The city couldn’t say how long that process will take.
“Can’t promise on when people will be able to ride the train — but all of the messy work certainly will be done by 2028.”
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