Expected to open in June, Berlin Brandenburg International Airport, a single new, robust air hub for Germany's capital, is nearing completion. Located 18 kilometers southeast of the city center, it will incorporate one runway from Schonefeld Airport, the smaller of Berlin’s two existing airports.
Mexico City’s wastewater system is undergoing major surgery, with work under way on a large tunnel and a wastewater treatment plant as well as several pumping stations.The Valley of Mexico, which contains 21.4 million residents across 2,020 sq kilometers, is an enclosed valley with no natural outlet for water to flow. It contains the lakebeds of five extinct lakes.Overextraction of groundwater has been causing the land on which the city rests to sink for decades. Currently, the rate of sinking is between five and 40 centimeters per year. The existing system of tunnels and pumps, which carry sewage and stormwater
The People-Profit Connection How Emotional Intelligence Can Maximize People Skills and Maximize Your Profits By G. Brent Darnell; BDI Publishers, Atlanta, 2011; third edition, 157 pages Design and construction firm managers can handle some of the toughest technical, logistical and physical demands on jobsites, but they also can be absolute wimps when it comes to managing their people challenges. In an industry driven by human interractions and networking, the “people-profit connection” has never been more important.In the latest edition of the “People-Profit” series, which began in 2004, Brent Darnell expands and refines his pioneering approach to how emotional intelligence plays
Click on each box below to view more about the project Interactive Image Map Since the dawn of the industrial age, railroads have been a vehicle for people, cargo and dreams of a better world. They remain a critical part of the transportation infrastructure of 2011. ENR has identified ten of the world’s most notable new railway construction projects based on geographic variety and cross-border economic impact. The projects include Angola’s Benguela Railway, China’s proposed line in Iran from Tehran west to Khosravi, China’s own Harbin-Dalian High-Speed Rail Line and China’s Lanzhou-Chongqing Rail Line. There are also reports on a
Map by ENR The North-South Transnational Corridor project aims to be the most direct link for freight shipments from Russia or Central Asia to the Persian Gulf. Related Links: The Ten Most Noteworthy Rail Projects: Overview and Related Stories Project: North South Transnational CorridorCost: $1.4 billionConstruction period: 2007-2012 Central Asian nations have been slow to establish rail links with their neighbors to the south for numerous reasons. During the era when the Central Asian nations were part of the Soviet Union, all their rail lines headed north to Russia, their major trading partner.Of the five Central Asian nations, Kazakhstan occupies
Related Links: The Ten Most Noteworthy Rail Projects: Overview and Related Stories Project: Tehran-Khosravi Rail LinkCost: $2 billionConstruction period: Unknown China, which wants to create more robust rail corridors across Asia, is offering to build a $2-billion freight rail line in Iran. If continuous railway corridors were in place and, standard-gauge track installed from end to end, containerized freight could travel from China to Europe much more rapidly by rail than it does by ship, the Chinese claim.In September 2010, Liu Zhijun, China's railway minister, and Hamid Behbahani, Iran’s minister of roads and transportation, signed an agreement that calls for building
Related Links: The Ten Most Noteworthy Rail Projects: Overview and Related Stories Benguela RailwayCost: $1.56 billionConstruction period: 2006-12For decades, the east-west, 1,344-kilometer-long Benguela Railway spanning Angola provided the shortest way to transport the Congo’s mineral riches to Europe and was the key leg of Africa’s only transcontinental route. The railway company, Caminhos de Ferro de Benguela, was also Angola’s largest employer, with a payroll of 14,000 by the 1960s. But Angola’s long civil war, from 1975 to 2002, terminated the line. Trains and repair crews were ambushed, stations bombed and bridges dynamited, and the right-of-way was mined.In 2006, the China
Related Links: The Ten Most Noteworthy Rail Projects: Overview and Related Stories Project: Harbin-Dalian High Speed RailwayCost: $14.4 billionConstruction period: 2007-11 China’s high-speed-rail building program is a bold commitment to increase passenger-carrying capacity on major routes while simultaneously freeing up other lines for additional freight service. One of the routes that is nearing completion is the 904-kilometer line linking the major port of Dalian with Harbin, the commercial hub of northeast China. The project was split into three separate construction contracts. China Railway Group Ltd. built the southernmost section, spanning 377 km from Dalian to Shenyang. China State Construction Engineering
Related Links: The Ten Most Noteworthy Rail Projects: Overview and Related Stories Project: Lanzhou-Chongqing Railway Cost: $11.3 billion Construction Period: 2008-14 Lanzhou is a city of heavy industry and petrochemicals, located on the south bank of the Yellow River in northwest China. With a population of 2.2 million, it is the capital and largest city in Gansu Province. About 800 kilometers to the south, Chongqing, a manufacturing center on the Yangtze River in Sichuan Province, is one of the largest municipalities in China, with a population of 30 million. The Qinling Mountains sit between the two. The Lanzhou-Chongqing Railway project
