The Eighth New Tram Line Starts at Libuš: 1.8 Kilometres to Nové Dvory for CZK 1.26 Billion, Half the Time Spent on Water Mains

The foundation stone for the Libuš – Nové Dvory tram line went down on Wednesday 7 October, in the temporary stub track at Libuš where the Modřany line currently stops. The 1.8-kilometre extension will be built by OHLA ŽS for CZK 1.26 billion excluding VAT — a price Zdopravy.cz reports and DPP's own release does not give. Jaromír Beránek, the first deputy mayor for transport, counted it as the eighth new tram line begun in this council term and said Prague's tram boom continues.

Divided out, the line costs around 700 million crowns a kilometre, which is high for surface track. Zdopravy.cz attributes that to what is buried under it. Almost two kilometres of DN 1200 water main from the Želivka reservoir, in two parallel lines, has to be moved along Novodvorská between the Libuš stop and the Chýnovská junction. DPP counts 78 construction and operational objects in the job, and says roughly half the construction time goes on the pipes rather than the rails.

Two seasons, and the first one is digging

Jan Šurovský, DPP's deputy chairman and technical director for surface transport, put the first milestone at the end of 2027: earthworks and utility relocations finished by then. The contract allows two years of construction in total, with trial operation planned for the end of 2028. The section extends the Sídliště Modřany – Libuš line, which DPP dates to the end of May 2023, and the two will run as one operating unit.

DPP will also build the foundations of the pedestrian underpass to the future Nové Dvory station on metro D, so that tram services need not be cut when the station is dug. Construction of the metro's Nové Dvory section began in June 2026, and up to 2,000 city-subsidised flats are planned in the area. Services will start with some journeys on line 17; lines 3 and 20 are to follow once the next stage of metro D is finished.

A loop of a kind Prague does not have

The track runs double along Novodvorská as far as the junction with Durychova, where it becomes a one-way single-track loop: trams turn into Durychova, then Libušská, and rejoin Novodvorská via Chýnovská. A block loop of this kind is new in Prague, and its point is the rolling stock. Until now the Modřany line has depended on double-ended cars; the loop lets single-ended trams reach Libuš and Nové Dvory.

Four stops are being built. Libuš is two-way, with a direct connection to the metro underpass as well as surface footways. Přírodní has platforms on both sides, shared with buses. Nové Dvory gets a separate manipulation and alighting stop plus a separate boarding stop. Chýnovská is one-way only, served towards Modřany.

Nine months lost to a complaint

DPP had meant to start in January. It had to hold off signing until the competition office, ÚOHS, ruled on a complaint about the tender lodged by T4 Building; the office found no fault. Pavel Macháček, the mayor of Prague-Libuš, welcomed the start and criticised the objections that held it up. The delay is not unusual in this programme — the P+R garage opened the same week at Opatov lost far longer to the same office — but it is nine months of a two-year job.

What follows is a political question

This is the last of the package of lines approved and brought to a shovel-ready state over the past decade. Four others are on site: Malovanka – Strahov, which started on Monday, the return of trams to Wenceslas Square, Počernická in Malešice, and Olšanská – Habrová. Most of them were approved in the 2014–2018 term, and Šurovský says a brief for anything new has to be approved by councillors — which makes it a question for whoever emerges from the current election.

That means above all a link between Prague 8 and Prague 6. That is an absolutely fundamental thing. From the city council we also have a brief for the southern part of the ring, that is a continuation off Dvorecký most into Jeremenkova, Olbrachtova, Vyskočilova and Pekárenská streets, in other words the Podolí–Michle line.

— Jan Šurovský, technical director for surface transport, DPP, to Zdopravy.cz

Šurovský said opening Dvorecký most had demonstrated the need: bus loads in that direction rose sharply, and the traffic now needs putting on rails. Other schemes were pushed back in the last term, among them the tram to Suchdol and the link from the Motol valley to Vypich. By his reckoning only one project stands out for how far its preparation has got — the line to Zdiby, which has a final zoning decision, and where DPP expects to begin obtaining building permits together with the Central Bohemian Region.