Lausanne has begun work on building Switzerland’s first metro system, dubbed the M2 Project. The 6km long system is divided into numerous worksites and contracts with five of the contractors electing to use Eickhoff roadheaders to excavate tunnels.
The tunnel profiles vary from 9.94m wide x 6.74m high to 11.7m wide x 7.61m high. The Eickhoff roadheaders have the ability to cut these sections as part of their standard cutting range without the need for machine repositioning, allowing for a faster work cycle.
An Eickhoff ET 380-L roadheader is at the Los 1200 worksite where it is owned and operated by the Ouchy – Croisette JV. A Marti owned machine to the same specification is in use at the Los 1700 site where it is operated by MaBat, a Marti/Batigroup JV. Los 1500 sees an Eickhoff ET 410-Q type roadheader owned by Rothpletz and operated by JPF Construction, as well as a type ETH 30 Hydraulic Milling Cutter. The last two Eickhoff machines are both ET 450-L models. At Los 1900, an Infra Tunnel owned machine is being used by the Tunnel des Vennes consortium and at Los 1400, Prader Losinger is using its own machine.
All of the roadheaders have previously been used on other tunnel contracts. The ET 380 models offer 200kW of cutting power, whereas the other models offer a heavier duty of 300kW.
The M2 Project will replace a funicular railway that connects the centre of the city with Lake Geneva.
Lausanne was the first city in Europe to build a funicular railway at the end of the 19th century and the new scheme shows the municipality’s adoption of 21st century technology to offer transport solutions. It will feature a fully automatic driverless train running on tyres despite an average gradient of 5.7%, rising as high as 12% for certain sections. Fifteen trains have already been ordered from Alstom.
The US$472M project will be mostly funded by a pledged US$258.6M from the canton of Vaud and at least US$59.3M from the Swiss federal government.
It is expected to take up to four years to complete, when it should have the capacity to transport 70,000 people per day, or 25M people per year. The journey time from Lake Geneva to the northern suburbs of Lausanne should be reduced to 18 minutes.
