France will send more experts to Hanoi to assist the construction and operation of an important metro project, according to French Ambassador to Vietnam Nicolas Warnery.

Ambassador Warnery and Nguyen Cao Minh, head of the Hanoi Metropolitan Railway Management Board, chaired a press conference on Wednesday afternoon to discuss the implementation of the Nhon-Hanoi Railway Station metro line.

The arrival of the first out of 10 trains in Hanoi on October 20 marked an important milestone of the project, the French diplomat stated at the meeting.

Despite the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, many French experts have been able to arrive in Vietnam since September to assist the implementation of the metro project.

More pundits will be sent to the Southeast Asian country in the coming time to carry out the trial run of the train, making sure that the 8.5-kilometer elevated section of the metro route, connecting Nhon Depot with the University of Transport and Communications, will be put into operation in 2021, Ambassador Warnery stated.

The developer will continue constructing the four-kilometer underground section, which runs from the University of Transport and Communications to the Hanoi Railway Station.

A tunnel boring machine manufactured by Germany’s Herrenknecht Company will be imported into Vietnam in late 2020, and the machine will be used to drill a tunnel for the underground metro section in the first quarter of 2022.

Stretching a total of 12.5 kilometers, the Nhon-Hanoi Railway Station metro line includes an 8.5-kilometer elevated section and four-kilometer underground section.

The capital investment increased from EUR783 million (US$920 million) in 2009 to EUR1.1 billion ($1.29 billion) in 2014, which is mainly funded by official development assistance (ODA) from France.

The metro line construction was originally expected to be finished in 2018, but an adjusted plan in 2019 showed that the elevated section will be operated in 2021, while the underground section will be complete in December 2022.

As of September, about 65.91 percent of the project had been finished, according to Minh, head of the Hanoi Metropolitan Railway Management Board.

The metro route is anticipated to help reduce 20,000 metric tons of vehicle exhaust in Hanoi each year.

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