The Webuild Group has won another contract in southern Italy that will see it contribute to the doubling of the capacity of Palermo-Catania-Messina high-capacity railway in Sicily.
The design-and-build contract for Fiumefreddo-Taormina/Letojanni Functional Lot 1 – a subsection of the Giampilieri-Fiumefreddo section of the railway – is worth about €640m.
The contract follows another one valued at just over €1bn that was recently won by the Group to work on the 2nd Functional Lot of the Taormina-Giampilieri section of the railway.
Commissioned by Rete Ferroviaria Italiana (Gruppo FS Italiane), Webuild will lead with a 70% stake in a consortium with Pizzarotti as partner with the remaining 30%.
The lot, which will create 8,000 jobs, concerns work along 15km of the railway between Messina and Catania, from Fiumefreddo to Taormina/Letojanni, Webuild said.
It includes an interconnection at Taormina/Letojanni, the dismantling of installations along the existing line between Fiumefreddo and the link with the historic line.
The latest contract also involves building an underground station at Taormina, four tunnels and two viaducts.
The project is part of the Messina-Catania-Palermo railway axis, which in turn belongs to the Scandinavia Mediterranean corridor of the Trans-European Transport Network (TEN-T) sustainable mobility initiative.
The Webuild Group is already working on doubling the capacity of the Bicocca-Catenanuova section of the Palermo-Catania railway that will allow trains to go at speeds of up to 200km/h between the Sicily’s two main cities.
Image: Rail capacity between Palermo (pictured), Catania and Messina in Sicily is set to double (Bengt Nyman/CC BY 2.0)
