Webuild has taken a significant step forward in the Salerno-Reggio Calabria High-Speed Rail Line project with the arrival of its largest Tunnel Boring Machine (TBM) in Europe at the Port of Salerno, Italy.
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The colossal machine, designed for Lot 1A (Battipaglia-Romagnano), will be used to excavate tunnels along the railway line.
With a cutting-edge design, the TBM is equipped with 18 motors generating 10 Megawatts of power and features a cutter head over 13 meters in diameter. This will allow it to operate continuously, requiring the expertise of over 100 specialized workers.
In addition to this newly arrived TBM, another machine from the Grand Paris Express project has been reconditioned at Webuild’s Terni facility—an industrial hub dedicated to remanufacturing TBMs in support of the circular economy.
Webuild currently has 60 TBMs, with 40 being used for projects in Italy, and 30 dedicated to work in the South.
These ongoing projects employ 6,800 workers and contribute significantly to the construction of over 300 kilometers of high-speed railway.
The ultimate goal of Lot 1A is to upgrade the country’s sustainable mobility, connecting northern and southern Italy with a railway that supports the energy transition while fostering economic growth and improved connectivity across Europe.
Webuild has consolidated experience in 50 countries. In almost 120 years of applied engineering on more than 3,200 projects, the Webuild Group has built 14,140 kilometres of rail and metro lines, 82,533 kilometres of roads and highways, 1,020 kilometres of bridges and viaducts, 3,408 kilometres of tunnels, and 313 dams and hydropower plants.
Projects include the expansion of the Panama Canal, the Long Beach International Gateway in California, the Third Bosphorus Bridge in Turkey, the skytrain bridge of the metropolitan train line north-west of Sydney, the Kingdom Centre skyscraper in Riyadh in Saudi Arabia, and metro lines in Copenhagen, Paris, Rome, Milan, Doha and Ryadh.
Projects under construction include the New Genoa Breakwater, the Brenner Base Tunnel, Line 4 of Milan’s metro, and Line C of Rome’s metro, the Genoa-Milan high-capacity railway line, and railway lines on the HS Naples-Bari and HC Palermo-Catania-Messina railway routes, the Snowy 2.0 hydroelectric project in Australia, and the Trojena project for NEOM in Saudi Arabia. ■