The contract, awarded by Romania's national metro company Metrorex, includes civil engineering work to build the 6.1 kilometres of line. Nine stations will be built along this section of line, and the project also involves work on the surface to restore the roads affected by the construction project. Work is scheduled to begin in the second half of this year and will take at most 25 months.

The route includes two parallel 5.7 metre diameter tunnels measuring 4.85 km. each, and a third tunnel measuring 260 metres linking lines 1 and 5 at Eroilor station. A total of 240,000 m3 of earth and rock will need to be excavated. The nine stations will be located between 15 and 20 metres below ground level.

Other bidders included a Turkish-Russian-Italian consortium (Dogus, Gulermak, Moskovsky Metrostroy and Salini) and an Austrian-Romanian group (Strabag and Straco Grup). The construction project will be financed by the European Investment Bank (EIB) and the Romanian government.

Operating in Romania since 2004

Romania is not a new market for FCC. In fact, the company has been working there since 2004. FCC has participated in a number of projects to upgrade highways and viaducts and it employs over 500 people in Romania.

Its main projects currently under way in Romania include the Basarab viaduct in Bucharest (114 million euro); the Bucharest north bypass, which includes building a bridge over the railway line at Otopeni; the Constanza bypass (119 million euro); and the Arad-Timisoara-Lugoj section of the DNC1 motorway.

FCC's experience in subway construction

FCC Construction has extensive experience in building railways and subways. In Spain, it worked on the extension of Madrid Metro's line 10 to connect with Metrosur, sections I and III of Metrosur, and Metro lines 8 (from Barajas to T4) and 3 (from Legazpi to Villaverde). In the Barcelona Metro, it built sections of line 9 (Bon Pastor-Can Zam and Zona Universitaria-Sagrera), line 5 (Horta-Vall d'Hebron), and line 2 (Clot-La Pau).

It is currently building the metro in Málaga under a concession and extending line 2 of the Madrid Metro to Las Rosas, as well as section I of Barcelona Metro line 9 (which includes 13 stations on the route from El Prat airport to Amadeu Torner).

Outside Spain, the company participated in the construction of the Lisbon Metro (Alameda-Expo section) and in the extension of line 2 of Athens Metro, as well as the construction of new stations there (Periteri and Anthoupoli).Through subsidiary Alpine, FCC is currently building the subway line between New Delhi and Indira Gandhi International Airport and two new sections of the Singapore Metro.

The company was recently awarded the contract to build the Toronto-York Spadina Subway Extension (TYSSE) in Canada, which includes construction of the North tunnels and the Highway 407 Station and is worth 304 million euro, and line 1 of the Panama City Metro (14 stations), worth 1 billion euro. In December, Alpine obtained a contract from Crossrail to build tunnels in London for 250 million pounds (around 295 million euro).