AECOM, as part of a joint venture, was awarded the extension of Montreal’s Subway Line 2 project, a mandate carried out in an Engineering, Procurement, Construction Services and Project Management (EPCM) mode for the Agence métropolitaine de transport. The subway network was extended from the island of Montreal to the city of Laval, beneath the Des Prairies River, bringing this essential transit element to over 400 000 new potential users and increasing the Montreal subway patronage of 20% in the first year after its completion.

The 803 million-dollar project encompassed the construction of a 5.2-kilometer tunnel, three stations, a back station, an underground garage, and eight auxiliary structures including ventilation stations, distribution station and emergency exits, as well as the construction of all related public transit infrastructures such as bus terminal, incentive parking lots and transfer station to the suburban train. Within this mandate, AECOM’s responsibility was to prepare all technical specifications (general and specific), design the tunnels’ structure, connections, junctions to existing tunnels, auxiliary structures and stations, as well as define the design criteria.

This major project was composed of several construction packages, which were coordinated and organized in order to provide the plans and specifications for tendering and construction on schedule for each package. Moreover, AECOM managed the coordination with the architects and the mechanical and electrical engineers, in order to fully integrate their contribution to the project. AECOM was part in the management committee, which oversaw the scheduling and work allocation packages for this fast-track project. This important assignment was a challenge in itself: AECOM dealt with difficult and unusual geotechnical conditions and environmental constraints and had to provide innovative, custom-built solutions to many structural problems along the way, all at the best possible cost.

AECOM’s multidisciplinary team members overcame this challenge hands down, as attested by the two excellence awards they were presented with after six years of hard and dedicated work. The project was honored by a prestigious 2009 Project of the year Elixir Trophy granted by the Canadian Project Management Institute’s Montreal chapter in addition to winning the 2008 Leonard Trophy, in the Project Management/Construction Management category, presented by the Association des ingénieurs-conseils du Québec.