FCC has been awarded a €267 million contract to design and build section 1 of Bucharest Metro line 5 in Romania. The citizen services company entered its bid in consortium with Italian company Astaldi and two Romanian companies, AB Construct and ACM Delta.
The contract, awarded by Romania’s national metro company Metrorex, includes civil engineering work to build the 6.1 kilometres of line. Nine stations will be built along this section of line, and the project also involves work on the surface to restore the roads affected by the construction project. Work is scheduled to begin in the second half of this year and will take at most 25 months.
The route includes two parallel 5.7 metre diameter tunnels measuring 4.85 km. each, and a third tunnel measuring 260 metres linking lines 1 and 5 at Eroilor station. A total of 240,000 m3 of earth and rock will need to be excavated. The nine stations will be located between 15 and 20 metres below ground level.
Other bidders included a Turkish-Russian-Italian consortium (Dogus, Gulermak, Moskovsky Metrostroy and Salini) and an Austrian-Romanian group (Strabag and Straco Grup). The construction project will be financed by the European Investment Bank (EIB) and the Romanian government.
Romania is not a new market for FCC. In fact, the company has been working there since 2004. FCC has participated in a number of projects to upgrade highways and viaducts and it employs over 500 people in Romania.
Its main projects currently under way in Romania include the Basarab viaduct in Bucharest (€114 million); the Bucharest north bypass, which includes building a bridge over the railway line at Otopeni; the Constanza bypass (€119 million); and the Arad-Timisoara-Lugoj section of the DNC1 motorway.
