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New ICE rail line from Cologne to Frankfurt: Satellite Pro notebooks used to monitor progress and costsThe new high-speed InterCity Express (ICE) rail line between Cologne and Frankfurt is not only one of Germany's most ambitious transportation projects in recent decades, it's easily one of the most expensive. By the summer of 2002, by which time the new ICE-3 train will be carrying passengers at speeds of up to 300 km/h, the current journey time of 135 minutes will be slashed by more than half to just 58 minutes. That's a significant amount of time saved compared with both road and air and the principal motivation behind this momentous feat of engineering. |
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Cast an eye over the topography of the route, however, and it quickly becomes apparent just how enormous this undertaking is. A direct line drawn from Cologne to Frankfurt crosses the Siebengebirge, Westerwald, and Taunus hills. On the ground, that's a roller coaster ride with many changes in altitude of several hundred meters. That also explains why the first track, laid over a hundred years ago, took a roundabout route along the Rhine valley to avoid the hills.
One means of overcoming the problem of gradient on this new rail link is to lay the track more or less alongside the A3 autobahn. Anyone who travels regularly between Cologne and Frankfurt by car will have a fair idea of the scale of the project and the ability to monitor its progress. But while the autobahn hugs the hills for much of the route - with trucks crawling up painful gradients such as the infamous Elzer Berg - the ICE line will use a series of tunnels to create a path that is flat enough for the required top speed of 300 km/h. 30 tunnels, 18 bridges Not surprisingly, the series of 30 tunnels required for the 219-kilometre line accounts for much of the total budget of almost DM 9 billion. It is also the reason for the shortage of tunnel engineers on other projects elsewhere in Europe. The various teams of tunnel specialists - mainly from Austria - are currently driving their way through the mountains from Bad Honnef in the north and Wiesbaden in the south. If we add the number of workers on these and all other project sites, including the line's 18 bridges, the total workforce on what is now Europe's longest construction site amounts to just over 20,000. The size of the project is even more apparent when you consider that the line will take more than five years to complete. The project was commissioned by the German rail network company, DB Netz AG, and is being implemented by Deutsche Bahn subsidiary DBProjekt GmbH. Given the enormous scale of the work, DBProjekt wisely decided to recruit specialist expertise to assist with various aspects of project management. One of those specialists is 44-year-old civil engineer, Roland Weis, whom we met at the DBProjekt offices in north Frankfurt. An employee of the well-known management and consultancy firm Drees & Sommer, Weis heads the fifteen-man team tasked with monitoring progress and costs. If anyone knows how well the project is going, it's him. "Things are looking pretty good at the moment," Weiss assures us confidently, pointing to a detailed project map stretching more than two metres across the office wall. While we struggle to interpret the mass of arrows and symbols, Weiss reaches for his Toshiba notebook. "Our job is to channel the flow of information, make sure the project is moving in the right direction, and render the whole process more transparent for our client. To help us do that, we've developed our own software tool, called NBS-Manager, which all project managers have on their notebooks." More accurate progress control NBS-Manager is an Access-based tool containing the key data for all major construction sites on the line. The program documents the current status of each of the sites, as well as the history of work since the beginning of the project. Project planners are now able to monitor progress more effectively - a major advantage given the considerable interdependency of each individual site and each successive stage of implementation. In order to obtain a more accurate overview of how the project is developing, Weiss has assigned individual team members to monitor each of the various sections of the line. The team members then visit the sites in person and document their findings with the aid of a portable computer. "There's no point relying on site management for accurate information," says Weis, clearly speaking from experience. "The picture they paint is always far too rosy." Another important feature of NBS-Manager is the integrated project map. As well as offering a clear overview of the overall route, it also includes the various sections with their tunnels and bridges. With just two clicks of the mouse, it's possible to zoom in on one of the most spectacular features in the central section: the 438-metre long and 48-metre high Lahn Valley Bridge. Big project, big numbers:
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