The main contract for Dublin's £350 million Luas light rail system, linking both Tallaght and Sandyford with the city centre, is expected to be awarded before the end of next month.
Two international consortiums, Alstom-Mowlem and Ansaldo-MVM-Christiani & Nielsen, have been short-listed for the contract, and CIE's Light Rail Project Office is examining the technical and financial aspects of their proposals.
Worth more than £100 million, the contract will cover track-laying and electrical works for Line A (Tallaght to Middle Abbey Street); Line B (Sandy ford to St Stephen's Green); and Line C (Middle Abbey Street to Connolly Station).
In March the first of 40 Luas trams is expected to roll off a production line at the Alstom engineering works in La Rochelle in France, to be shipped to Dublin in October after a series of stringent tests.
Alstom's Citadis 301 tram, the type selected for Luas, is 30 metres long and can carry 235 passengers. Described as the most modern available, each tram can be extended to 40 metres to provide additional capacity.
The Luas trams are similar in design to those introduced this year on new light rail systems in the French cities of Lyons, Montpellier and Orleans. They will all be low-floored, offering access at the same level as the stop platforms.
Costing more than £50 million, the 26 trams for Line A and 14 for Line B will be powered by overhead electrical cables at 750 volts DC. The first of them will be stationed at the depot for Line A, now under construction at the Red Cow interchange.
Work is progressing on the depot site where the trams for Line A will be "stabled". Most of the steelwork for the central control room is almost complete, and a concrete retaining wall for the administration block has risen to its second level.
The main contract to be awarded next month will cover civil works and track construction, power supply and substations, overhead traction, signalling and control systems and landscaping. It also includes new bridges for Line B and a tram depot at Sandyford.
Meanwhile, the Light Rail Project Office is undertaking preparatory design work and public consultation for an extension of Line B to Cherrywood. This will involve a public-private partnership, with contributions from developers on the route.
Preliminary work is also under way on an extension of the Tallaght-Connolly Station line through Docklands to the Point Depot, while a new round of public consultation is expected to start soon on a northside line to Dublin Airport.
British transport consultants W.S. Atkins are also working on possible alignments for the first phase of a metro system, in line with ambitious proposals made by the Dublin Transportation Office and accepted by the Government in September.
Mr Donal Mangan, director of the Luas project, said the work on the Luas project now was a key element in the Government's commitment to put a strategy for infrastructural development in place, focusing on transport in Dublin.
The first Luas phase should be completed early in 2003. Asked about the cost over-run on an original estimate of £220 million, Mr Mangan said this was due to changes in alignments, inflation, ordering more and longer trams and the high cost of property acquisition.
