STUTTGART 21 HIGH-SPEED LINE

The project

The Stuttgart 21 high-speed rail line will help relieve traffic congestion and upgrade the city’s railway junction, while cutting journey times between Stuttgart and Ulm (towards Munich).

The solution

The goal with the S21 project is to modernise the Stuttgart railway junction, on the future high-speed rail line connecting Paris and Budapest. We worked on section 1.4, on the outskirts of the city towards Ulm.

The challenge

We enlisted our full set of skills on this project: earthworks, drainage and civil engineering.

The main challenge was staffing, as this was our first large project in Germany. We did so by bringing in expatriates as well as hiring locally, which entailed nurturing loyalty and providing long-term prospects.

The project highlight: our positive relationship with the customer, on personal and technical levels, earned us a series of works packages on this project.

Environment

One issue on this project was the large amount of leftover excavated material, and we addressed it by treating the soil on site with hydraulic binders to maximise reuse. The remaining deposits were used to renature a quarry, which at the same time supplied us with railway subgrade and other valuable materials.

This strategy was based on something we do very well: optimising reuse based on each material’s destination while staying on schedule.