ABSTRACT
ABSTRACT: The Line 1 of Bologna Metro is 7 km long with 12 stations which crosses the entire city from the Fiera District to the Maggiore Hospital. The system adopted is a light rail tramway operated with 34-m long, single-unit vehicles. The line is designed to be completely underground and its construction involves the use of all the available tunnelling technologies: cut and cover, TBM and NATM. The portion of the vertical alignment in the city centre is very deep to avoid damage to buildings and to allow the line to underpass the new High Speed Railway tunnel near the Central Railway Station, where it is foreseen an interchange with the metro. The Piazza Maggiore Station is the most complex and important in the entire line and represents a great challenge, for designers in particular, because at this station site the horizontal alignment has a turn of 90◦ which has to be built completely by conventional tunnelling techniques.
