Austrian Federal Railways (ÖBB) has awarded the 75-million-euro contract to build Pummersdorf Tunnel to FCC through the group's subsidiary ALPINE.
The ground-breaking ceremony was attended by the minister for Infrastructure, Doris Bures, the chairman of ÖBB-Holding AG, Franz Seiser, and the director of ALPINE Bemo Tunneling GmbH, Franz Pacher.
The 3,500-metre-long, twin-track Pummersdorf Tunnel will be built by tunnel-boring machinery. The project has been designed with a single tube and six emergency exits. The contract includes the tunnel and a 12.8-kilometre-long section of railway line, which is scheduled to be completed by December 2014. The construction of this connection between St. Pölten and Loosdorf will expand the capacity of the central station in St. Pölten, benefiting all passengers.
FCC's Experience in Building Tunnels
The FCC Group can show plentiful references for its work on tunnels of many different types.
Among FCC's more recent jobs are a number of high-speed railway tunnels, such as the 7.3-kilometre-long Atocha-Chamartín Tunnel, which makes for easier train connections between locations in southern and eastern Spain and locations on the lines in the northern half of the country. Then, there is the Madrid-Levante Tunnel, whose section from Siete Aguas to Buñol was the scene where the TBM advance rate world record was beaten five times; the record now stands at 83.2 metres tunnelled and 52 concrete rings set in a single day. FCC also built 25-kilometre-long Pajares Tunnel on the León-Asturias line's Pajares bypass and the Guadarrama Tunnels, which are over 28 kilometres long and provide high-speed rail access to northwestern Spain.
Right now FCC is building Sorbas Tunnel, a twin-tube project that, when finished, will be Andalusia's longest railway tunnel, approximately 7.5 kilometres in length. Outside Spain FCC is busy with the Faido and Bodio sections of the rail infrastructure for St. Gotthard Base Tunnel in Switzerland, the world's longest tunnel (about 52 kilometres long), and it is building a railway tunnel in Karlsruhe, Germany.
