On 1 June 2016, 17 years after the first blast in the main tunnel, the Gotthard Base Tunnel was officially opened at a five-hour ceremony. Politicians from Switzerland and other countries accepted invitations to attend, including the German chancellor Angela Merkel, the French president François Hollande and the Italian prime minister Matteo Renzi. Surrounded by members of the Swiss Federal Council, Swiss president Schneider-Ammann symbolically cut through the tape in the afternoon and handed over the tunnel to Swiss Railways SBB.
In late June 2016 Implenia signed the contract for construction of the “Lot GC01” section of the Line 11 extension to the east of Paris. Line 11 is run by the “Régie autonome des transports parisiens” (RATP), the state operator of public passenger transport in the capital of France. This infrastructure contract forms part of the major “Grand Paris Express” project. Implenia is taking on the job together with consortium partners NGE (France), Demathieu & Bard (France) and Pizzarotti (Italy). The “Grand Paris Express” project aims to improve links between the French capital and neighbouring residential areas in the Greater Paris region (Île-de-France) by building a transport network of six driverless underground railway lines by 2030.
The German Federal Administrative Court, sitting in Leipzig, ruled on 14 June 2016 as the final court of appeal that the involvement of the federal state and the respondent, the state capital of Stuttgart, in the financing of the Stuttgart 21 rail project does not constitute “inadmissible co-financing of third-party public works”. The court thus declared inadmissible a citizens‘ initiative, via which the opponents of the project hoped to achieve a referendum on the state capital’s withdrawal from its contractually agreed financial obligations.
Another milestone was accomplished on the new railway line Wendlingen–Ulm when the tunnellers crossed over the 30 796 m mark on 19 June. Hence, half of all tunnels on the new railway line are driven.
With the exception of the Klaus chain of tunnels and the Gleinalm Tunnel, Austria‘s Pyhrn Autobahn A9 toward the Slovakian border is fully completed....
As from 1 July 2016 Sandvik has merged its operations „Mining“ and „Construction”. Sandvik Mining and Rock Technology is now one of four remaining business areas. According to Sandvik it will be organized in a de-centralized business model with separate product areas. Each product area will have full responsibility and accountability for its respective business.
In the course of the refurbishment measures started in 2011 after more than 50 years of operation, the dam and the bed of the Sylvenstein Reservoir in Bavaria were provided with a new cut-off wall (two-phase diaphragm wall) and a precise seepage water measurement system. The seepage water measurement system consists of drainage piles and a 190 m long seepage water tunnel, constructed by the company Wayss & Freytag Ingenieurbau using the microtunnelling technique. In order to minimise problems with the tunnel boring machine and hinder ingress of water into the launching cavern and the target shaft, these unpredictable zones of the rock mass had to be stabilised and waterproofed.
In the case of shield driving with a segmental support and annular gap mortar grouting, lifting forces act on the segment rings once they leave the shield tail. These forces can lead to pronounced misalignments of neighbouring rings, damage to the ring joint and diminished leak tightness. A two-component mortar can be applied to avoid this damage, which reaches the necessary stiffness to support the segments once the components have been mixed in the annular gap. This report deals with the targeted new development and optimization of the mortar. An explicit set of requirements is defined and it is explained how aggregate is used to arrive at an early, stiff bedding for the young segment rings while at the same time saving on accelerator.
More than 2300 tunnellers from 54 countries gathered from April 22 to 27, 2016 in San Francisco, USA. The occasion was the 42nd Annual Meeting of the ITA (International Tunnelling and Underground Space Association) in conjunction with the 2016 World Tunnel Congress (WTC). The Tunnel Congress was organized by the UCA of SME (Underground Construction Association, Division of Society for Mining. Metallurgy and Exploration Inc.) in conjunction with the ITA. It was captioned “Uniting our Industry”.
The Institute and Laboratory of Geotechnics of the Technical University of Darmstadt held the 23rd Darmstadt Geotechnics Colloquium on 10 March 2016,...
In the middle of May, a few weeks before the official ceremony to open the Gotthard Base Tunnel (GBT), the Swiss Tunnelling Society (Fachgruppe für Untertagbau/FGU) presented their comprehensive engineering reference book “Tunnelling the Gotthard” to the public for the first time. On the occasion of the viewing in the presence of more than 150 guests at the Swiss Museum of Transport, speakers included the former Swiss Federal Council member Adolf Ogi, who gave a much noticed speech.
