Road Structures

The cost of rebuilding the Leopold II tunnel in Brussels has increased from original estimates. The tunnel runs from the Koekelberg Basilica to central Brussels and the three year contract is planned to commence in 2017. Two funding options are in the frame with a conventional tender process and annual maintenance deal expected to cost €450 million. The design, build, finance and maintain (DBFM) option would cost €665 million over a 30 year period meanwhile.

A new report is now available detailing the performance of the demolition industry within Europe during 2015. This has been produce by the European Demolition Association (EDA) and is titled the European Demolition Industry Report 2015. The report was compiled by the Deutscher Abbruchverband (DA), the Statistics Working Group of the EDA, headed by Andreas Pocha, general manager of DA.

Three major new bridge projects are now being carried out in Vietnam. All three of the bridges are being carried out under the build-operate-transfer (BOT) model with completion scheduled for 2018. The 3.26km Chau Doc Bridge will link the towns of Tan Chau and Chau Doc in An Giang Province. Meanwhile the other two bridges will improve the road connection between Tra Ving Province and Soc Trang Province. The Dai Nghia Bridge No1 measures 0.86km long while the Dai Nghia Bridge No2 measures 2.24km long.

A loan facility will help pay for new road development planned for Honduras. The US$150 million, 20 year loan has been approved by the Central American Bank for Economic Integration (CABEI). The PIV road infrastructure scheme set out by Honduras is intended to develop the country’s network. The funding will be used on over 180kms of roads in various parts of the country.

State-owned Indonesian toll road firm Jasa Marga plans to increase its network by 460km by 2018. This will bring its total network to 1,050km by 2018. During 2016, Jasa Marga intends to spend US1 billion developing its toll road network and general operations. By 2018, the Trans Java toll road should be open to traffic.

A Terex crawler crane has been used to lift out a concrete bridge in the German town of Zweibrücken. The work was carried out shortly after the Terex Superlift 3800 lattice boom crawler crane had been supplied to Trier-based specialist Steil. The crane hire firm already had four Terex crawler cranes in its fleet with this new arrival bringing the number to five. The machine had a particularly short journey to make to the job site as it had just been manufacturerd at the Terex facility located in Zweibrü