Karlsruhe-Basel high-speed rail link – new and upgrade construction project

2020 got off to an excellent start with the launch of a new project marking another milestone in ZPP’s deployment of its BIM approach in large-scale infrastructure projects in Germany. As part of an engineering consortium, ZPP landed the planning and design contract for a large-scale BIM project of Deutsche Bahn: upgrade and new construction work for the existing Rheintalbahn line between Karlsruhe and Basel.

The 182-km Karlsruhe-Basel high-speed rail link is the centerpiece of Europe’s key rail freight corridor between Rotterdam and Genoa. The existing Rheintalbahn section of this high-speed link is over 150 years old. Serving up to 300 trains a day, its capacity limits have been stretched and exhausted so that upgrading this section to satisfy the rail traffic requirements of today and tomorrow is mission-critical. The 45-km segment between Teningen and Buggingen south of Freiburg is to be upgraded so that end-to-end sustained speeds of 200 km/hr. are enabled in regional rail service. Apart from 14 stations, the segment also includes a total of 112 road and railway overpasses, plus a variety of retaining walls, noise barriers, culverts and other junction structures that have to be modified or constructed anew.

Deutsche Bahn’s project approval section 8.7, for which ZPP has been tapped for the planning and design work, provides for an alternative line including a tunnel solution — an exciting task for the ZPP colleagues in Munich and Bochum since all planning and design work of this segment will be done exclusively using BIM.