Hanoi (VNA) – Metro project No.3 from Nhon to Hanoi railway station in the capital city will begin to have its underground stations drilled in early 2020, and the work is scheduled to be completed the same year.

Le Quang Hanh, Deputy General Director of the FECON Joint Stock Company, said the four underground stations, namely Cat Linh, Van Mieu, Kim Ma and Hanoi Station, will begin to be bored in early 2020.

He noted that after finishing site clearance, the contractor will start drilling, which will be relatively fast, in just a few months, and this process is expected to be finished within next year.

Meanwhile, Pham Viet Khoa, Chairman of the Board of Directors of this firm, said difficulties relevant to site clearance are being resolved, but sub-contractors are facing payment-related problems. Although a workload worth about 100 billion VND (4.3 million USD) has been completed, the money has yet to be disbursed for his business.

[Hanoi seeks to fund urban railway project with ODA, preferential loans]

FECON is treating the ground by using the jet grouting technology at stations S9 (in Ngoc Khanh ward of Ba Dinh district), S10 (Cat Linh ward of Dong Da district), S11 (Van Mieu and Van Chuong wards of Dong Da district), S12 (Cua Nam and Tran Hung Dao wards of Hoan Kiem district); along with the foundations of linking tunnels and the locations of pumping stations.

Also this August, the FECON Underground Construction JSC received a tunnel boring machine in Ho Chi Minh City and transported it to the firm’s workshop in Luong Son district of the northern province of Hoa Binh. Earlier, FECON had successfully operated this machine in the Ben Thanh – Suoi Tien metro project in HCM City in June 2018. After that, the company decided to buy this machine to serve future metro projects.

To gear up for the drilling, it has sent all the engineers and workers who finished their duties in the Ben Thanh – Suoi Tien project to receive more training overseas from now to the end of 2019 to gear up for important tasks next year.

The personnel and equipment completion and the close cooperation with leading partners in the field of underground structure building from Japan and Italy like Raito Kogyo and Tunnel Pro demonstrates FECON’s resolve to further engage in this potential area, a FECON leader said.

According to the Hanoi Metropolitan Railway Management Board, the project has had 51.2 percent of its workload completed. The entire elevated section has been joined, and contractors are working on stations and depots of this section.

For the underground section, contractors are working at the areas with site clearance already completed, including parts of stations S9, S10 and S12. Only more than 5 percent of the workload of the project’s package No. 3, which covers tunnels and underground stations, has been finished, the management board reported.

The Nhon – Hanoi Station metro project is 12.5km long, including an 8.5km-long elevated section and a 4km-long underground section, traversing the districts of Bac Tu Liem, Nam Tu Liem, Cau Giay, Ba Dinh, Dong Da and Hoan Kiem.

[Elevated section of Nhon-Hanoi Station railway connected]

Recently, the Hanoi municipal People’s Committee approved adjustments to the implementation duration and the capital structure of this project.

Accordingly, the project will be carried out until 2022, instead of the initial deadline of September 2017. The elevated section will be put into use in April 2021 while the whole metro line will become operational in December 2022.

In the total investment capital of 1.17 billion EUR, Hanoi decided to reduce the funding sourced from the official development assistance of the French Development Agency (AFD) from 178.7 million EUR to 158.7 million EUR, and raise the borrowing from the French Government from 335.4 million EUR to 355.1 million EUR./.
VNA