Fehmarnbelt rail and toll tenders cancelled: programme risks for project teams
Reviewed by Tom Sullivan

First reported on New Civil Engineer
30 Second Briefing
Sund & Bælt has cancelled two live tenders for rail systems and tolling facilities on the Fehmarnbelt fixed link after confirming a roughly two-year delay to construction of the 18km immersed tunnel between Denmark and Germany. The pause affects procurement of key systems for the four-track rail and dual-carriageway road elements, including signalling, power and tolling infrastructure that must be integrated into the tunnel’s prefabricated concrete elements. Contractors and designers now face extended interface and programme uncertainty, particularly around systems installation windows and commissioning sequences.
Technical Brief
- Design teams face rework on interface control documents and staging plans aligned to revised tunnel programme.
- Procurement teams must re-sequence long-lead items for signalling, power and tolling hardware against new milestones.
- Similar large tunnelling schemes may need more flexible systems-contract phasing to absorb civil works slippage.
Our Take
Within our 726-item Infrastructure set, multi‑year construction delays of around two years tend to trigger full retendering or scope rebundling on complex links like the Fehmarnbelt, as clients try to realign interface risks and pricing with the revised programme.
For operators such as Sund & Bælt, cancelling rail systems and tolling tenders this late in the build sequence usually signals a shift towards tighter integration of O&M considerations into the remaining procurement, as lifecycle cost assumptions are now out of date against the new completion horizon.
Across the 1983 tag‑matched ‘Projects’ and ‘Contract Award’ pieces in our database, late-stage cancellations on major transport links often precede a move to framework-style or negotiated contracts rather than open competition, to compress lost time and lock in specialist systems suppliers earlier in design finalisation.
Prepared by collating external sources, AI-assisted tools, and Geomechanics.io’s proprietary mining database, then reviewed for technical accuracy & edited by our geotechnical team.
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