On February 28, 2016, a referendum held in Switzerland narrowly decided in favour of building a second bore for the Gotthard Road Tunnel. The controversial new bore will be provided with two lanes to cope with traffic from the existing 17 km long tunnel opened in 1980, which urgently needs to be repaired and upgraded. Afterwards, both will function as single-lane directional tunnels as established by law.
There was reason to celebrate on February 27, 2016 during the construction of the Albabstieg Tunnel on the new Wendlingen-Ulm route. Between the portal at Dornstadt and the access tunnel in the Lehrer Tal valley, in the early evening the tunnellers blasted the final block of rock at a depth of 40 m in the western bore. After the breakthrough, there is now an uninterrupted tunnel connection.
The works for the new construction of the second bore of the 8.3 km long Gleinalm Tunnel in Austria have already been under way since November 2013....
The DB Projekt Stuttgart–Ulm GmbH awarded the contract to build the 8176 m long Albvorland Tunnel on the new Wendlingen–Ulm route to the Swiss construction and service provider company Implenia in late December, 2015. The contract is worth some 380 million euros.
The World Tunnel Congress is the world‘s premier tunneling event and in 2016 it is being held in one of the United States‘ premier cities. This year‘s WTC will be held 22–28 April in San Francisco, California.
The 15th Swiss Tunnel Congress (STC) will take place in the Kultur und Kongresszentrum Luzern (KKL) from 15 to 17 June 2016, organised by the Swiss Tunnelling Society (STS). The annual STC with accompanying exhibition and an additional excursion day has ensured itself a fixed place in the calendars of tunnellers as a platform for clients, designers, engineers, suppliers, service providers, contractors and the industry.
On March 4th2016, the Danish political parties behind the Fehmarnbelt link mandated Femern A/S to appoint the preferred bidders for the main tunnel contracts with the aim of entering conditional contracts no later than mid-May 2016. The contracts are valid until theend of 2019 with theoption to renegotiate at that time.
Modelling the contact conditions between the outer and inner shell represents an important element in conjunction with numerical calculations of tunnel shells. Tests on the mechanical bonding behaviour of tunnel shells and waterproofing systems in double-shell tunnels have been carried out in the lab. The aim of these analyses was to ascertain the properties of waterproofing membranes and protective geotextiles when installed in the tunnel and when the bearing behaviour of the primary shotcrete shell is reduced. Towards this end, tests were executed in order to investigate the behaviour given various mechanical effects on the bonding system, consisting of shotcrete, geotextile, waterproofing/sheet membrane and inner shell concrete.
Based on the Deutsche Bahn guideline (RiI) 853, verification of computational fire protection was undertaken for the inner shell of the Steinbühl Tunnel. Initial calculations had revealed that in order to confine concrete spalling, a non-contractual procedure calling for the application of a concrete mix with PP fibres would be required. As a result, additional computational verifications for fire incidents were undertaken on the part of the client as a “second opinion” for the case of fire. This culminated in proving that the inner shell can indeed be verified without PP fibres being applied by taking advantage of possible optimization factors.
The ceremonial opening of the Wehrhahn Line in Düsseldorf, the capital of North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany, took place on 20 February 2016. Surrounded by businesses and shopping streets, the tunnelling project to extend the Düsseldorf Stadtbahn was constructed between 2007 and 2015 through the heart of the city. Particularly in the inner city, the responsible engineers had a number of challenges to overcome, for example the restricted space available, the requirement to minimise nuisance to the shopping area and tunnelling beneath a 100-year old department store.
The Südbahntagung conference was initiated in 2008 as a forum at which findings and case studies on major tunnelling projects in Austria such as the Semmering Base Tunnel, Koralm Tunnel and the Granitztal valley chain of tunnels as well as other projects on the southern line (Südbahn) could be presented and discussed. The 2015 event with more than 250 participants was held on November 27 and 28 in Graz.
