VINCI officially inaugurates the Hallandsås tunnels, Sweden’s most challenging railway project

8. 12. 2015 - 17:45 - Baustellen - Schweden

- VINCI Construction Grands Projets and its Swedish partner Skanska succeeded in building the tunnels through the “impenetrable mountain”
- Sweden’s longest railway tunnels were built using VINCI Construction Grands Projets’ transport infrastructure expertise
- A major goal of the project is to open up the economy of the western part of Sweden
- 10 years of works, for a €850 million investment

The two Hallandsås railway tunnels in southwestern Sweden were officially opened today at a ceremony attended by Mr. Mikael Damberg, Sweden’s Minister for Enterprise and Innovation, Mrs. Lena Erixon, Swedish Transport Administration Director General and Mr. Alain Bonnot, VINCI Construction Grands Projets Chairman. The tunnels are the country’s most important railway infrastructure project in 40 years. It took 10 years and an investment of €850 million to complete them.

The project was initiated in 1970 but did not effectively get under way until 2004, following two failed attempts by other companies to build them. VINCI Construction Grands Projets and its Swedish partner Skanska were the first to succeed in boring through a complex geological formation to construct two parallel tunnels with a unit length of nearly 5,500 metres and an interior diameter of about 9 metres.

The Hallandsås tunnels are part of the national refurbishment program of the Malmö-Gothenburg railway line. The new line will make a strong contribution to opening up the economy of western Sweden. When the line officially inaugurated today is opened to traffic on 15 December, its capacity will increase from 4 to 24 trains per day, travel time between Malmö and Gothenburg will be shortened and the load capacity of freight trains will double.

The project introduced one-of-a-kind environmental management measures. A broad-based ecological management programme was applied to protect water and the local ecology as a whole. The County Administrative Board, the environmental assessment group and the neighbouring Båstad and Ängelholm municipalities also continuously monitored construction.

With its worldwide recognised transport infrastructure expertise, VINCI is a global company able to support public authorities’ railway infrastructure projects. Over the past 20 years, VINCI has bored some 900 km of tunnels. It is currently operating 10 large tunnel boring machines around the world on projects that include the major Lee Tunnel project in London designed to clean up the Thames; Line 3 of the Cairo metro; and 13.8 km of tunnels to connect the Doha airport with the historic centre of the capital of Qatar, on which five tunnel boring machines are working simultaneously.

 

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