High Speed Rail Project
Project Value: 6.7 billion euros ($8124 million)
The HSL-Zuid Project will provide the Dutch with a 300-kph railway from Amsterdam southwards to the Belgian border, a distance of some 100km.
Journey times between Amsterdam and Paris or Brussels will be reduced by over an hour, and in some places internal domestic travel times will be halved – i.e. Amsterdam to Breda, or Rotterdam.
The total cost is around 6.7 billion euros, but the building of the substructure and railway infrastructure it carries, are being met by a public private partnership arrangement requiring no initial government investment.
The contracts cover both construction and 30 years maintenance. Following completion, the Netherlands government will pay around 106 million euros (excluding VAT) each year as an availability fee but they will offset this with the 148 million euros they expect to receive each year from the train operator as user fees.
This project is unique as the substructure for the railway, which includes all bridges, earthworks and tunnels, is provided by the Dutch State; everything on top of this is contained within a PPP. Scott Wilson and the project team are very proud to be working on Europe’s largest rail PPP project, and the project won the European PPP Project of the Year award in 2001.
Scott Wilsons involvement on the project can be traced back to the year 2000.
Our services are two fold: technical due diligence advice to the lending banks during the period up to financial close, and monitoring and certification work during the whole 30 year concession period for this finance, design, build, operation and maintenance contract.