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Business
FCC finishes
drilling
the first tunnel
section of line 5 of
the Riyadh Metro
These works
mark a new milestone
for the FCC team, making
it the first one to arrive
at a station and the one
which has drilled
more kilometres of tunnel
to date
The FAST consortium, which is led by the
Citizen Services Group, is the team which
has excavated most kilometres so far (3,8
km of the total 12,9 km of the line) we have
excavated 4,658 metres so far. The FCC-
led consortium, FAST, has finished drilling
the first tunnel section of line 5 (green line)
of the Riyadh Metro. The metro tunnel bo-
ring machine, “San’ah”, reached the Salah
Al-Din station, thereby completing the ex-
cavation of a 1.2 km section of a total of
5 km comprising this section. These works
represent a new milestone for the FCC
team after becoming the first team to reach
a station having excavated the most kilo-
metres of the tunnel so far.
With this progress, the consortium, which is
responsible for the construction of lines 4,
5 and 6 of the metro, has become the work
team that has advanced most throughout
the implementation of the project.
The drilling works, which began on 30 June
2015 at the new central office for the Minis-
try of Education, will continue on the north
section of line 5 (green line) until they reach
Riyadh Airbase Roundabout. There they
will be met with our tunnel boring machine
“Dhafrah”, the first machine to start drilling
works on the Riyadh Metro project, which
will be used to finish the 12.9 km tunnel of
line 5.
A historical experience
FAST employees and members of the Arri-
yadh Development Authorities met with
residents of the district of Salah Al-Din,
who were invited to take part in this histo-
ric experience. Local people from this tiny
district could witness how the machine’s
cutterhead chipped through the walls of the
station and they gave the FAST engineers
who were operating the machine a round of
applause when they came out of the tunnel.
During his speech, project director of the
FAST consortium, Jaime Freyre, mentio-
ned “his satisfaction that both tunnel boring
machines have been the first to reach the
milestone which entails drilling this section
of the tunnel and meeting the set deadlines.
Dhafrah was the first machine we launched
Video describing the Riyadh Metro project
