Contract models for TBM drives in hard rock – codes in Austria and Switzerland

The Austrian standard conditions of contract for underground works with continuous tunnelling have been available since 2005. Until then, contract conditions for equential and continuous tunnelling were combined in a single code. In Switzerland, major transport tunnels were already being bored with TBMs at the start of the 1970s, much earlier than in Austria.

A comparison between Austria and Switzerland, where there has also been a standard bill of quantities for TBM drives for a long while – the Norm-Positions-Katalog – which is generally accepted and used practically universally, indeed show a basic similarity in the essential points, but in the implementation of the details there are still considerable differences as the article by Eckart Schneider and Markus Spiegl in Geomechancis and Tunnelling reveals.