Extending Line 3 of the Cairo metro

18 June 2015 - New contracts - Egypt

The Egyptian authorities have demonstrated their continuing confidence in the joint venture led by VINCI Construction Grands Projets alongside Bouygues Travaux Publics and their Egyptian partners, Orascom Construction and Arab Contractors, by awarding it the civil engineering contract for a new section of Line 3 of the Cairo metro, the east-west link across the Egyptian capital. Charged with the design and construction of the project, the joint venture has committed to a very short delivery deadline of 34 months, made possible thanks to the experience it has acquired over more than 30 years of working on this metro system, the oldest in Africa, and to a technical innovation that is a worldwide first: the earth pressure balance tunnel boring machine Imhotep, used for the previous phase, will be modified to operate as a slurry pressure balance machine. This change will generate savings for the joint venture in both its execution time and its budget. Worth €264 million, the project will employ around 3,200 people, mostly Egyptian. In addition, ETF (Eurovia), in a joint venture with Orascom, will head the design and construction of the section’s 10 km of track, and of its power supply rail. This new phase of works (Phase 4A) on Line 3, following on from Phase 2 (photo below), which was brought into service in May 2014 more than six months ahead of schedule, will involve building 5.15 km of tunnel and five underground stations, from Haroun to El Nozha.