caltrane74
Senior Member
Tunnel Boring Equipment for the Eglinton Crosstown Line - Old Article.
This report is before Rob Ford requested that the entire line be built undergound. This project will not take 10 years as planned. Maybe 20 years to build the whole thing.
http://www.thestar.com/news/gta/transportation/article/841424--metrolinx-orders-tunneling-machines
ARTICLE FROM - JUNE 28th - 2010
Metrolinx orders tunneling machines
Tess Kalinowski
Transportation Reporter
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Transportation»
Who says Toronto’s new light rail lines won’t be as good as a subway?
Metrolinx has ordered four giant tunnel-boring machines for $54 million to build the underground section of the Eglinton Crosstown Transit City light rail line.
“The LRT in the 11- to 12-kilometre tunnel is a subway in the sense that it is rail cars travelling underground with underground stations and no other traffic,” said Metrolinx head Rob Prichard. “The LRTs will be one, two or three cars in length. A subway is typically six cars. Therefore an LRT station underground has a shorter platform.”
About 12 kilometres of the $4.6 billion Eglinton LRT will run underground, from about Black Creek Dr. in the west to Laird Ave. in the east.
The beauty of the LRT, according to Prichard, is that at the end of the tunnel, riders can stay on the same vehicle and ride above ground all the way east to Kennedy station rather than transferring to a bus or streetcar.
The customized machines will be built by Lovat Inc. in Toronto, the same company that is supplying the TTC with four other tunnel-boring machines.
The TTC’s $58 million order for machines last year will be used to extend the subway into York Region.
The same machines could not be used for both projects because the tunnel on Eglinton will be about 6 metres wide, compared with the 5.4-metre tunnel on Spadina.
Light rail vehicles require pantographs (overhead structures) for their power supply, unlike the subway, which uses a third rail, said Prichard.
The ridership on Eglinton will be adequately served by light rail rather than subway, he said.
The first of the tunneling machines, which take about 18 months to build, will go into the ground around Black Creek.
On the east side, the LRT will continue above-ground all the way to Kennedy station. A second above-ground phase of the project on the west side, still unfunded, would see the line extended to the airport in the future.
Most of the tunneling will take place between 2012 and 2014, with the entire first phase of the line complete by 2020.
The tunnel-boring machine order is the latest proof of the Ontario government’s commitment to funding Toronto’s Transit City lines in the next 10 years, Prichard said.
David Miller has repeatedly insisted that the Transit City projects, which also include a makeover of the Scarborough RT and new LRT lines on Sheppard and Finch, might never be built since the government deferred about half of the $8 billion it committed to those projects in its spring budget.
The current Metrolinx plan calls for all four Transit City projects and a $1.5 billion express bus lane system in York Region to be completed over 10 years.
This report is before Rob Ford requested that the entire line be built undergound. This project will not take 10 years as planned. Maybe 20 years to build the whole thing.
http://www.thestar.com/news/gta/transportation/article/841424--metrolinx-orders-tunneling-machines