A line of people looking at a concrete barrier inside a tunnel waiting for it to be torn down. It went on like this for around 20 minutes, at the same time as the sound of a pneumatic hammer increased in volume until it could no longer be heard. In that moment of temporary silence, interrupted by applause, a hole was opened in the concrete and light came out: the excavation of the tunnel that connects the future stations of Carregal/Hospital de Santo António and Praça da Liberdade is finished. One stage has been completed, now there are two more to go before the rail connection between Casa da Música, in Boavista, and São Bento Station is closer to operation. By July of next year, Metro do Porto says, the line will be ready to receive passengers – a year ago it was expected to be operational at the end of the first quarter of 2025.
The symbolic moment was attended by journalists, the vice-president of the Porto Chamber, Filipe Araújo, the councilor for Urbanism, Pedro Baganha, and the president of the board of directors of Metro do Porto, Tiago Braga. It is the last one that ventures a date for the start of the line’s operation: “Our schedule, today, points to the 28th of July [de 2025]”. At that time, the vehicles will already be circulating. In September, “at the beginning of the academic year”, there will be “16 vehicles per hour in each direction”. At the beginning of the operation this may not be the case because demand may not justify it.
Still in the tunnel, beneath Rua dos Clérigos, he assured journalists that the deadline now set for the end of the works will be met. This Wednesday afternoon, the underground connection channel was about to be cleared with the help of an excavator equipped with a pneumatic hammer prepared to knock down the last obstacle – created to support the soil – for the tunnel to be completely excavated. Next comes the connection between Praça da Galiza and Jardim do Carregal/Hospital de Santo António, whose “brickwork” will be ready “by the end of June”, and then the tunnel that will connect Casa da Música to Galicia, which will be excavated “between October and November” of this year.
The deadline for this phase of the work slipped (and also for the others), as the municipality had already noted by sending several letters to the public transport company. And Tiago Braga justifies this delay with the various challenges encountered throughout the project, particularly due to the nature of the soil, which forced certain precautions to be taken to mitigate the impact of the excavation. “We advanced 18 meters per week in some areas and in others we only advanced 1 and a half meters per week. This certainly caused some setbacks”, he explains.
On the other hand, he states that it ended up paying off in terms of preserving the built heritage that was already “a few centuries old”: “We verified that we covered these 580 meters without any impact on the surface, without any significant damage.”
The budget also slipped, by around 30%. The president of Metro do Porto relies on the increase in the value of construction materials to justify the increase in costs. In total, the Pink Line, with a length of 3.1 kilometers, will cost 304.7 million euros, a bill covered by the Portugal 2020 program, the Operational Program Sustainability and Efficiency in the Use of Resources (POSEUR) and the Cohesion Fund of the European Union.
Metro in Vila D’Este before São João
Once this phase of the tunnel excavation between Jardim do Carregal and Praça da Liberdade is completed, there will be a relief from the occupation of public space, with the dismantling of the construction site. “We are committed to freeing the connection between the Aliados and Praça Almeida Garrett by São João. And by the end of the year we will completely vacate Avenida dos Aliados”, he states. Rua da Madeira will continue to be closed because it is necessary to complete the “access galleries” to that street and São Bento Station. “The last intervention will be the replacement of the tram because it will depend on the access galleries to Rua da Madeira and São Bento station”, he highlights.
However, there will be a phase in which the works will return to the site because it will be necessary to resolve a “rainwater and sanitation issue”. This will result in a new cut in the “upward direction” of the avenue for a “relatively short intervention”.
By São João this year, the goal is also set for the metro to reach Vila D’Este, in Vila Nova de Gaia, a project that results from the extension of the Yellow Line. It remains to be seen what exact date it will take place. There is no answer to that yet. “There is no specific day. We are currently training train drivers”, says Tiago Braga.
