Qatar Rail, the company overseeing the construction of the country’s integrated railway network, said it has entered into the Guinness World Records for its tunnelling operation.

Describing it as a major milestone for large-scale transport projects across the region, the company said it won official recognition in the record books for “The Largest Number of Tunnel Boring Machines (TBMs) Operating Simultaneously in a Single Project”.

Qatar Rail said the 21 advanced TBMs deployed across the works for the Doha Metro stations have achieved many breakthrough milestones for the project’s overall progress.

With this recognition, Qatar Rail has broken its own previous world record of simultaneously operating 19 TBMs, said a senior official.

“This recognition by the Guinness (records book) is a hard-earned and well-deserved testament to the collective power of our teams, our partners and our stakeholders, who never lost sight of what is needed to deliver our ambitious plans,” remarked Abdulla Abdulaziz Al Subaie, the managing director of Qatar Rail.

Prior to the recognition, Professor Arnold Dix, an independent record verifier and a highly accomplished tunnelling expert and lawyer who heads a legal chapter in the International Tunnelling Association (ITA), validated the results. A verification committee comprising 20 inspectors was appointed for each operational TBM. The members had only last month (September) filmed the machines while in operation.

The inspectors were also supplied by the Geographic Information System (GIS) data of Qatar Rail that confirmed works and status of all TBMs.

All these records were handed over by Prof Dix to the Guinness committee.