The Riyadh metro:
the most important metro construction project in the world
At the end of July of this year, the award
of the largest international contract in the
history of the Spanish construction indus-
try was announced. The consortium hea-
ded by FCC will build lines 4, 5 and 6 of the
subway; the contract is worth 6.07 billion
euro.
Thirty-seven consortia comprising the
world’s leading construction companies
participated in the tender process. The pro-
ject was divided into three packages that
Three civil engineers, with broad experience
in the Company, were assigned to head this
project:
•
Jaime Freyre, the former director of
the United States and Canada area,
will be at the helm of the FAST con-
sortium.
•
The joint-venture in charge of the civil
works will be headed by Álvaro Se-
nador, whose previous post was as
the Director of Development at FCC
Industrial in Latin America.
•
Tomás Arranz, who joined FCC in
1990 and has occupied various posts
at the Company as project manager
and has wide experience in the cons-
truction of metro projects, will be in
charge of the work corresponding to
Line 5 of the metro system. In his pre-
vious job, he worked as the manager
of the third section of Line 9 of the
Barcelona metro. He is very familiar
with the Riyadh project in which he
has been involved since July 2012.
Organization of the project
A new way of doing things
Einstein said something to the effect that
if you want to obtain different results, you
have start doing things differently. In the
Riyadh project, work commenced in a di-
fferent way as has been the case until now.
Since the contract was awarded, it was
decided to introduce a new function in the
work team, that of a contract manager
whose mission is to ensure that the con-
tract is used on a daily basis to manage
the project, monitoring not only the timely
compliance of all obligations, but also en-
suring that the project is executed on time
and according to the specifications of the
contracting party. Three people are wor-
king towards achieving this objective: Pepe
Ruiz, contract manager of the consortium;
Margarita Ruiz, a member of the contract
manager’s team; and Eduardo Romero, a
member of the joint-venture’s procurement
team.
•
Pepe Ruiz, a civil engineer, began his
career at FCC in 2000. For the past
two years, he has been working as
the manager of Management Control
at Alpine, supervising the company’s
92 largest projects throughout the
world.
•
Margarita Sánchez is an architect
with a graduate degree in building
from the European University of Ma-
drid (UEM). She joined FCC in 2001
and, since then, has participated in
several of the Company’s projects, in-
cluding, as the most important ones,
the Enniskillen Hospital and Caja
Mágica. Over the past year, she has
been working as the head of Alpine’s
technical office.
•
Eduardo Romero is also an architect
and holds a building degree from
UEM. He is multidisciplinary tech-
nician with broad experience in su-
pervising all aspects of international
projects: quality, financial, technical,
and purchasing. In the past year, he
has worked as a technical manager
at Alpine.
The Riyadh team is being formed gradua-
lly and in the forthcoming issues we will be
presenting the team there and those who
have been incorporated.
were awarded to other international con-
sortia: one led by the Italian group STS,
another one by Bechtel (U.S.), and a third
one led by the Spanish group FCC.
The package awarded to FCC includes the
design and construction of lines 4 (orange),
5 (yellow) and 6 (purple), which will have 25
stations, requiring a total of 65 kilometres of
rail track between the viaducts, 26.6 kilo-
metres of underground tracks, and 8.2 kilo-
metres of aboveground track. To build this
project, FCC will be using three boring TBM
boring machines with almost 10 metres of
diameter.
Wok is scheduled to begin in about 8
months and will have an execution period
of five years. It will create more than 30,000
jobs during the construction period, 15,000
of which correspond to the part awarded to
the FCC-led consortium.
The new public transport services repre-
sent an opportunity for transforming the city
of Riyadh. The new transport infrastructure
will reduce traffic congestion, will bolster
and boost the economy of the Kingdom of
Saudi Arabia, and will be to the benefit of
the country’s population.
