70% of viaduct spans erected on Dubai Metro's Red Line

Mr. Adnan Al Hammadi, Director of Rail Construction Department at Rail Agency said "The company completed 11,000 pre-cast segments out of 12,300 for the Red Line at the Jebel Ali Casting Yard, and 70% of the viaduct spans erected for the Red Line to date. The elevated structures for the Metro project are slowly but surely snaking their way with ease all over the city. Currently 2500 pre-cast segments are ready for delivery in the casting yard which has a storage capacity of 3000 segments."

"The pre-casting plant employs more than 1800 workers and the concrete segments are transported on demand from the casting yard to the launching gantry sites using 33 heavy haulage trucks.

The casting yard produces around 40 segments per day using roughly around 800 m3 of concrete per day and 160 ton of steel per day.

More than 350,000 m3 of concrete, 75000t of reinforcement steel and 13,500t of post tensioning high strength stands steel and 500t of epoxy glue will be required.

Around 63 moulds are used and within these types a total of 33 different designs are required depending on the use of the element to be casted."

"The project will call for 1700 spans in total to be constructed for both the lines with a total of 16500 segments, nine tower cranes, and 11 gantry cranes.

Launching gantries are used for the majority of the viaduct construction providing a fast-track installation process enabling the erection of a complete viaduct span in two days." he added.

Currently 10 launching girders are working at a time using the span-by-span erection method while the balanced cantilever method is used for about 5% of the project for special bridges spanning over 72m and above urban obstacles like interchanges, existing & future road projects."