THE 15.6km Naples Afragola - Cancello section of the Naples - Bari high-speed/high-capacity line has opened. This follows the completion of the 18km Cancello - Frasso Telesino-Dugenta and Bovino - Cervaro sections. The Frasso Telesino - Telese section is due to open in December.
Trenitalia has taken the opportunity to introduce a direct daily Frecciarossa service between Naples Central, Bari, Brindisi and Lecce, which takes 3h 34min from Naples to Bari, compared with 4h 5min previously, and 5h 3min to Lecce. Once the entire project is completed, the journey time between Naples and Bari will be reduced to just two hours.
The Naples - Cancello section runs through a densely populated urban area and includes a new station at Acerra. It required the construction of four viaducts with a total length of about 4km.
The main engineering challenge of this section was the construction of 650m-long Casalnuovo tunnel which was built using the hyperbaric excavation technique. Webuild says this is the first tunnel in Italy to use this technique and one of the few applications in Europe in the presence of an aquifer.
Webuild is responsible for building three further sections: Apice - Hirpinia, Hirpinia - Orsara, and Orsara - Bovino.
Designed for operation at up to 250km/h, the 145km Naples - Bari high-speed line is expected to cost €5.8bn in total.
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