Tens of thousands of Hungarians to get a new metro
A metro is being built in Cluj-Napoca (Kolozsvár), the “capital” of Transylvania, Romania’s second most populous city.
The city council signed the design and construction contract for the Cluj-Napoca metro line with representatives of the consortium of Turkish Gülermak, French Alstom and Romanian Arcada companies on Thursday in the glass hall of Cluj-Napoca City Hall, napi.hu reports.
Several representatives of the Romanian government, Prime Minister Nicolae Ciuca, Interior Minister Lucian Bode and Transport Minister Sorin Grindeanu were present at the event, as the project is largely financed under the National Recovery Plan (PNRR).
Nicolae Ciuca described the Cluj-Napoca metro line project as the most valuable and significant investment of the last 30 years.
The metro project involves a EUR 2 billion investment. The planning process will take six months, after which construction can start.
19 stations planned to be built by 2031
The PNRR requires the first nine stops to be completed by 31 July 2026, even if there are no trains running between them. The project will continue until 2031, when all 19 stops must be built and operational, napi.hu explains.
A separate transport plan will be drawn up for the construction period, which will last several years and will also affect the city centre, because traffic in the city is already heavy.
Representatives from the consortium of Turkish Gülermak, French Alstom and Romanian Arcada said that they had already built a metro in Dubai and were ready to do the same quality work in Cluj-Napoca.
The consortium will spend RON 9.059 billion (EUR 1.8 billion) excluding VAT to design and build the Cluj-Napoca metro line.
21 km metro line to cross the city
photo: Daily News Hungary
The metro line will be 21 kilometres long and will run east-west through the city and the agglomeration, including the main square. It will run for 14.7 kilometres in Cluj Napoca and 6.3 kilometres in the area of Florești (Szászfenes), west of the city, which has a population of around 40,000.
19 stops will be built on the metro line. Between them, three-car trains will run every minute and a half, carrying 21,600 passengers per hour.
Driverless trains
Alstom’s turnkey metro system will enable driverless operation, with Urbalis CBTC (communications-based train control) technology supporting high-capacity service, an integrated control centre and a state-of-the-art cyber security interface. Romania’s first fully automated metro line will operate in an energy-efficient way, making a significant contribution to green mobility throughout Cluj-Napoca.
Featured image: illustration (Pixabay)
Living on a large island of rock our metropolitan Halifax can’t have a subway despite needing alternative transportation to personal cars & badly operated limited bus services. The first time I took my daughters to metro Toronto and they got to ride on the underground subway system from the suburbs to metro’s core to shop at famous Honest Eds was better than a few years later when I drove them to Florida over 3 days to go to Disney. Life and commerce & tourism bring lots of money to city centers & surrounding ‘burbs so this is a great project to enhance transportation. Hope that they stick to timelines & budgets….hope that the contract has laid out fines to be paid for missing benchmarks. ‘Cus big projects often become vehicles for mismanagement, theft and it is always the taxpayer who gets the short end of the stick.
‘Hungarians’? That’s pretty funny! Why? Because while there are around 2 million ethnic Hungarians living in Transylvania. It belongs to Romania since the unfair threaty of Trianon! So check your facts!🤔
Why unfair “threaty” [sic]?. The Romanians have always been the majority in Transylvania.