A consortium led by Bouygues Travaux Publics has signed a contract worth €164.9m (£131.8m) for the second tunnel package of the Paris metro line 14 extension project, north of the French capital.
Bouygues wll work with Soletanche Bachy France, Soletanche Bachy Tunnels and CSM Bessac on the contract for client RATP. The line will run Clichy-St Ouen to Pleyel, in the neighbouring town of St Denis. This underground infrastructure project, which is 55% financed by Société du Grand Paris, will help to relieve congestion on Line 13, improving travel conditions and access to Paris for people living in the northern suburbs.
The consortium will be responsible for constructing a 2.2km tunnel linking Clichy-St Ouen and Pleyel, including a tunnel that links to the train maintenance and marshalling zone. The team will also build the Mairie de St Ouen station and other structures including reinforcing the infrastructure of line C of the RER regional express network.
Environmental measures will include removing all excavated materials by river, for instance, to avoid disrupting road traffic in the towns concerned by the project.
The project, which will be carried out with an 80m-long earth pressure balance tunnel boring machine, includes several major technical challenges. These include the need to take account of the diversity of soils along the route and the reinforcement work needed for line C, beneath which the tunnel to the train maintenance zone will pass. To meet these challenges, the consortium will analyse all the data collected from the TBM and resulting from monitoring on the surface in real time in order to have the capacity for immediate response.
The works will begin this summer and last several years, mobilising nearly 260 employees at peak periods. The companies in the consortium have undertaken to hire site workers through social inclusion schemes, providing 20,000 hours of employment.