Before & After


sometime after the 1980s renovation, but the Men’s Waiting Room ceiling was intact, which provided the team with the ornate patterns needed to reproduce the ceiling in the Ladies’ Waiting Room. “We also were able to replicate a custom-made bronze fixture to put in the Ladies’ Waiting Room,” Holloway says. “We were really pleased with the degree of artistic interpretation and the ability to match the fixture that was in the Men’s Waiting Room.”


The Retrofi t Because trains actually travel over Wilm-


ington station, a lot of structural stress has been placed on the building during its more than 100-year history. In addition, as trains pass through the station, they deposit grime and items that can damage the roof of the building, which is literally under the tracks. “Most of the structural damage that occurred was in brickwork and steel where rust and water penetrated the station. All those things were remediated or patched,” Holloway recalls. “The biggest problem was—because the tracks basically run over the roof of the building—waterproofing those track beds.”


During off hours and weekends, tracks


were removed and the construction crew installed a liquid-applied rubber membrane to waterproof the area under the tracks and above the concourse. “There was a lot of re- search and studying with the Amtrak bridge folks,” Holloway says. “They wanted the membrane to be able to withstand the stuff trains deposit along their track and be easily repairable should a piece of the train fall off or scrape against the membrane.” Modern building codes also had a major


effect on the station’s retrofit. For example, Wilmington station hosts up to 700,000


May-June 2013 // RETROFIT 35


Page 1  |  Page 2  |  Page 3  |  Page 4  |  Page 5  |  Page 6  |  Page 7  |  Page 8  |  Page 9  |  Page 10  |  Page 11  |  Page 12  |  Page 13  |  Page 14  |  Page 15  |  Page 16  |  Page 17  |  Page 18  |  Page 19  |  Page 20  |  Page 21  |  Page 22  |  Page 23  |  Page 24  |  Page 25  |  Page 26  |  Page 27  |  Page 28  |  Page 29  |  Page 30  |  Page 31  |  Page 32  |  Page 33  |  Page 34  |  Page 35  |  Page 36  |  Page 37  |  Page 38  |  Page 39  |  Page 40  |  Page 41  |  Page 42  |  Page 43  |  Page 44  |  Page 45  |  Page 46  |  Page 47  |  Page 48  |  Page 49  |  Page 50  |  Page 51  |  Page 52  |  Page 53  |  Page 54  |  Page 55  |  Page 56  |  Page 57  |  Page 58  |  Page 59  |  Page 60  |  Page 61  |  Page 62  |  Page 63  |  Page 64  |  Page 65  |  Page 66  |  Page 67  |  Page 68  |  Page 69  |  Page 70  |  Page 71  |  Page 72  |  Page 73  |  Page 74  |  Page 75  |  Page 76  |  Page 77  |  Page 78  |  Page 79  |  Page 80  |  Page 81  |  Page 82  |  Page 83  |  Page 84