Metro D Goes Underground at Nové Dvory, Three Months After the Second Stage Broke Ground

Tunnelling on the second stage of metro D began at Nové Dvory on 18 September, almost exactly three months after construction of the section from Ryšánka — the station formerly called Olbrachtova — to Nové Dvory started. The transport undertaking DPP, which announced it, says the first thing to be driven is the access and ventilation tunnel of the future Nové Dvory station. The section is being built by a Czech-German consortium of Subterra, HOCHTIEF CZ, HOCHTIEF Infrastructure and BeMo Tunneling; the tunnelling itself is HOCHTIEF CZ's.

So far there is 2.5 metres of it. That is the starting notch of the access tunnel, cut after the site compounds were set up, the construction pit and the tunnel portal dug, and the utilities diverted and connected.

What gets dug, in what order

The access tunnel and the ventilation tunnel together come to about 300 metres. The access tunnel is temporary: it exists to carry the excavation out and the station in, and it goes no further than that. About 103 metres along it, the ventilation tunnel branches off, and that one stays — it becomes part of the non-public technological half of the station.

The ventilation tunnel will meet a shaft being sunk on a separate site south of the Lidl store on V Štíhlách street. Roughly two thirds of its 34 metres are down. Both tunnels are to be driven by about the end of the first quarter of 2027, after which the contractors start on the station itself — a single-vault station, with its escalator tunnels and lift shafts. DPP says Nové Dvory will be completely excavated before the boring shields reach it from the Rezerva site.

The machines are being built

The two tunnel boring machines are under contract and in production, and DPP expects them at Rezerva in the middle of 2027. The site is being prepared for them now: Subterra is laying and compacting aggregate for the launch pit at the retention basin, and the logistics base and the hall that will make the segments for the machines are going up alongside it.

The rest of the section is at the stage before the digging. At the two Nové Dvory sites that will become the northern and southern vestibules, HOCHTIEF CZ is relocating utilities, and the lift shaft at the northern vestibule is due to be sunk in the coming weeks and finished this year. Geomonitoring is running along the inter-station section from Ryšánka to Nádraží Krč. At the Branická street compound and at Nemocnice Krč, Subterra is about to start utility diversions and build the temporary Branická and Zálesí roads — which have to exist before any construction pit can be opened. At the Nádraží Krč station site the utility diversions are already under way, and a pit is about to be dug there to increase the capacity of the Kunratický brook.

What was said

Prague's first deputy mayor for transport, Jaromír Beránek, tied the date to the one three months before it.

Three months ago we started building the second stage of metro D, and today the builders are already continuing directly underground. The move from preparatory works to the tunnelling itself towards Nové Dvory is clear proof that we are keeping up the pace on our biggest transport priority. The southern part of Prague has deserved modern, high-capacity and ecological transport for decades. To the workers underground I wish, under the protection of Saint Barbara, above all a safe return from every shift and a smooth course for the first 300 metres of tunnelling.

— Jaromír Beránek, first deputy mayor of Prague for transport

Tomáš Koranda, chairman of the board of HOCHTIEF CZ, was blunter about what comes next.

We are now entering one of the technically most demanding stages of the project. In the coming months we face the excavation of the station, the escalator tunnels and the related underground structures in difficult geological conditions, and all of it has to be done in a very short time.

— Tomáš Koranda, chairman of the board of HOCHTIEF CZ

The mayor of Prague 4, Ondřej Kubín, called metro D the most important infrastructure project in the district and said that once the line is finished residents will no longer have to travel by bus and change, and drivers from outside Prague will not have to come deep into the city.

The statuette blessed over the portal on the day by Father František Čech, of the Roman Catholic parish at the Church of Our Lady Queen of Peace in Prague-Lhotka, is a Saint Barbara — patron of miners, builders and tunnellers — carved from lime wood by the Grossrubatscher brothers of Val Gardena in South Tyrol, whose workshop DPP dates to the seventeenth century. The custom is older than any of the machinery, and it is the one part of a tunnelling start that does not appear in the schedule.