Page 6 - TunnelTalk Annual Review 2015

Global connections
Two different rail gauges in Spain and different
gauges in the other countries is a significant challenge for this corridor. Opening of the 621km high-speed line between Madrid and Barcelona in 2008 reduced the travelling time in this corridor from five to two hours 38 minutes and changed travelling from air and road to railway.
4. Orient/East-Mediterranean Corridor
The long northwest-southeast Orient/East- MedCorridoroptimisestheuseoftheports and the related motorways from Central Europe with the maritime interfaces in the North, Baltic, Black and Mediterranean Seas. This corridor uses main rivers, including the Elbe, and provides a link to Cyprus. Much is needed in this corridor to build on or upgrade multimodal connections between Hungary, Bulgaria, Romania and Greece. Cross-border traffic management systems on rail and inland waterways are to be implemented on many sections.
5. Scandinavian-Mediterranean Corridor
As the longest of the core network corridors, this crucial axis for the European economy links the major urban centres in Germany and Italy to Scandinavia and the Mediterranean. The Brenner Base Tunnel and the Fehmarn Belt immersed tube crossing are the most important and key components to resolve cross-border bottlenecks in this corridor. Sections from east and west meet in Nuremberg, Germany to continue to Munich and via the Brenner Base Tunnel to Verona. The last section connects Italy with Malta via motorways of the sea. Main projects, including the completed Öresund road and rail bridge and tunnel fixed link between Sweden and Denmark, and the Milano-Roma-Napoli high-speed rail line are completed and in service. The new 19km long road and rail immersed tube crossing of the Fehmarn Belt between Rodby in Denmark and Puttgarden in Germany will replace the existing bottleneck ferry line and is into the construction procurement stage. Excavation of the Brenner Base Tunnel is also advancing.
6. Rhine-Alpine Corridor
This north-south corridor is one of the busiest freight routes in Europe and provides connections to several east- west axes. The corridor includes mighty tunnelled connections including the 35km Lötschberg Base Tunnel for passenger and freight rail traffic in Switzerland which is in service; the 57km long Gotthard Base Tunnel of the AlpTransit Project which is planned to start operation in 2017; and the Ceneri Base Tunnel which is due to start operation by 2019.
7. Atlantic Corridor
The Lisbon, Madrid, Paris and Strasbourg/ Mannheim network links the high speed and parallel conventional rail lines of the Iberian Peninsula with France and Germany. This includesa57kmupgradeonthenorth-south railservicesaroundStuttgart.Muchofthe Stuttgart-21projectisalignedunderground. Main missing links for both road and railway in the corridor are between Lisboa and
Madrid, Porto-Valladolid and San Sebastian- Bordeaux. In June 2011, the Tours-Bordeaux high-speed rail line started operation as a public private partnership project and with financial support from the European Investment Bank. This was the first high speed rail line PPP in France.
8. North Sea-Mediterranean Corridor
The Channel Tunnel is an important part of this cross-border connection, converting many travelled kilometres from air and road to rail. In 2010, this corridor became Europe’s first fully operational cross-border high-speedpassengerrailservicebetween Belgium,France,Germany,theNetherlands and the UK (London-Brussels-Amsterdam- Cologne-Paris). Also under operation in the corridor are high-speed lines between Lyon and eastern France, Switzerland and Germany. Missing rail connections between Belfast and Dublin or Dublin and Cork, are being developed by the DART project.
9. Rhine-Danube Corridor
This main east-west corridor is linking all continental European countries along the Main and Danube Rivers to the Black Sea. It includes improving high-speed rail and inland waterway interconnections from France and Germany to Austria, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria. Main missing links are the cross-border rail network interconnections between Germany and its neighbours France, Austria and the Czech Republic. Also needing to be removed are bottlenecks between Austria and Slovakia, and within Slovakia, Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria.
Legal funding procurement
The major cross-border projects for the coming 10 years in the TEN-T Network are the Brenner and the Lyon-Turin railway base tunnels through the Alps and the Fehmarn rail-and-road crossing in the Baltic Sea. These and other main cross- border projects require enormous financial, political and administrative commitment. Preparatory activities such as route alignment, environmental and geological assessments, decision-making on organisational set-ups, financing, permitting andcontractingproceduresandmore,have taken considerable cost and effort to date. Development of these projects have now reached a point of no return and the potential benefits, as TEN-T links, elevate them to crucial investment status. While these projects stand out for their role as TEN-T success factors, the challenges associated with each differ depending, for example, on the project’s geographical and technical features, on political, legal and administrative processes and on structural choices made.
Denoting the significance of the March conference on Cross Alpine Corridors of the European Commission in cooperation with BBT SE, several political celebrities from the participating European countries attended the conference. Ministers of Transport for seven European Union member nations and officials of the European Commission also attended the ground breaking ceremony of the Ahrental
Tunnel contract in Innsbruck as an historical start of the largest construction lot of the Brenner Base Tunnel on Austrian territory.
The Brenner Congress started with keynote speeches by the Transport Ministers of Austria, Germany, Italy, France, Slovenia, Switzerland and Liechtenstein. These European Coordinators at the congress discussed Project Structure, Project Financing, Procurement and Legal Procedure and Communication.
“The need to involve private financing for our projects is becoming more and more important,” explained Carlo Secc, European Coordinator of the Atlantic Corridor. All financial resources were explored, including cross-financing and polluter-pays schemes; identification of suitable project components; total life- cycle approaches and clarification of legal frameworks to attract investors.
“The problems are very clear, but the solutions are not,” stated Kurt Bodewig, European Coordinator of the Baltic Adriatic Corridor. Measures to facilitate procurement were summarised as simplifying procurement rules, standardisation of procurement processes, establishment of a legal seat independent from the participating countries, definitive choice of procurement language and acceleration of the processes by increasing efficiency.
Exchange through appropriate governance, involvement of the local population, exchange of best practices via tunnel job site visits and open days, and a strong communication of the benefits of all the projects to Europe as a whole, was agreed as vital to progress of these masterplans.
In his presentation, Christian Kern, CEO ÖBB and Chairman of the Community of European Railway and Infrastructure Companies said that in view of the €700 billion investment in future rail projects, “we are at a turning point of structural change and we must manage investments wisely.” Maurizio Gentile, CEO of Rete Ferroviaria Italiana, cited the Brenner Base Tunnel development by Italy and Austria as an example of how to solve different problems in the field of technical and normative harmonisation. Operations through the Brenner Base Tunnel, the longest underground railway connection intheworldtodatearesettostartattheend of 2026 and will cut rail travel times between Innsbruck and Bolzano from 2 hours to less than 1 hour. n
References
• Prelude to building Brenner Baseline – TunnelTalk, March 2009
• Brenner Base Tunnel – let the works begin! – TunnelTalk, April 2011
• Brenner pushes ahead with new contracts – TunnelTalk, July 2014
• Brenner Base Tunnel river undercrossing award – TunnelTalk, November 2014
• Ground preparation at Semmering Base
Tunnel – TunnelTalk, February 2013
• First TBM launched for Koralm rail tunnel –
TunnelTalk, February 2013
• Progressing the Lyon-Turin base rail link –
TunnelTalk, August 2013
• Fehmarn costs adjusted as awards awaited
– TunnelTalk, January 2015
• Channel Tunnel 20 years on – TunnelTalk,
December 2010
• Major tunnel and station awards on
Stuttgart-21 - TunnelTalk, March 2012
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