A train carriage of Metro Line No. 1 (Photo: VNA) So far, nearly 89 percent of theworkload on Metro Line No. 1 has been completed, deputy head of the HCM CityManagement Authority for Urban Railways Nguyen Quoc Hien told a ceremonylaunching tasks of the project earlier this year.
He said relevant parties willstrive to restore the ground and traffic in the city’s centre by April 30 andthen conduct trial run on several sections. The entire route is expected tooperate on a trial basis by December 31, according to Dau tu (Vietnam InvestmentReview).
This year is key to the MetroLine No. 1 project as the route is scheduled to be put into commercialoperation in 2023, Hien noted.
Also at the event, Permanent ViceChairman of the municipal People’s Committee Le Hoa Binh said city leaders paygreat attention to this particularly important project, and that they willincrease solving outstanding problems facing it. He asked the investor andcontractors to enhance efforts to address difficulties and carry out theproject on schedule.
People in HCM City and thecountry as a whole expect this metro line will create an impulse for localeconomic development, which has suffered from pandemic-caused difficulties, headded.
Metro Line No. 1, nearly 20kmlong, has total investment of over 43.7 trillion VND (1.9 billion USD) andconsists of three underground stations and 11 elevated ones. It was initiallyscheduled for completion in late 2021 and run commercially in 2022, but thendelayed due to the pandemic’s impact and procedure-related problems.
Meanwhile, site clearance forthe Metro Line No. 2 project is also being accelerated.
Construction of this routewill begin in the second quarter of 2022, Binh went on, saying that land-relatedissues and the COVID-19 pandemic hampered the site clearance progress last year.
Metro Line No. 2 needs more than251,000 square metres of land to be cleared. Over 83 percent of the ground necessaryfor the project has been handed over so far.
Binh said other key transportprojects will also be promoted to boost transport connectivity with the metrolines./.
VNA
