Saudi Arabia, Riyadh Metro Special Reports and Interviews
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Saudi Arabia, Riyadh Metro Special Reports and Interviews

RAFAEL MORAN
KSA Managing Director, TYPSA


RAFAEL MORAN
KSA Managing Director, TYPSA



5 JUNE 2018: TYPSA, the lead designer on the FAST Consortium, provided the detailed designs for Line 5, as well as upgrade packages for highways, landscaping and permanent utilities covering Lines 4, 5 and 6.

 

Having been involved on the Riyadh Metro since the pre-qualification stages, the Spanish consulting engineering giant’s design expertise is rooted in Package 3’s project DNA. Yet, even for a firm with a track record of designing large Metro systems around the world, the unparalleled ambition of the Saudi capital to build a network from scratch in just a few years was new territory, says its top executive in the Kingdom.

 

“You’re not re-inventing the wheel with a Metro, but conditions in Riyadh are unique because our brief was to integrate the Metro into the city. That is not easy. But the ADA did a great job aligning the needs of all the different stakeholders, who all had different vested interests, to achieve the goal of integration,” explains Rafael Moran, TYPSA’s KSA Managing Director.

 

TYPSA’s Riyadh Metro team of about 220, spread across three offices in Riyadh, Abu Dhabi and Madrid, were charged with devising solutions to the considerable and varied construction challenges posed by Line 5 in particular - an entirely underground section for which the company had overall design responsibility.

 

“One of the principal issues we had to face was the high water table in Riyadh, and how this would affect the underground structures even coming from water losses from existing utilities,” says Moran.

Line 5 runs in a combination of cut & cover excavated tunnel and single-tube TBM [Tunnel Boring Machine] tunnel sections.

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