VERY INTERESTING: TUNNEL BORING MACHINE

 Hello ladies and gents this is the Viking telling you that today we are talking about

TUNNEL BORING MACHINE 

City Rail Link’s Tunnel Boring Machine (TBM), Dame Whina Cooper, has started excavating the second of two 1.6-kilometre-long tunnels from Mt Eden to central Auckland 

 The TBM will travel via the underground station under construction below Karangahape Road and is planned to arrive at the Aotea construction site in early spring

• The TBM completed its first excavation just before Christmas last year and was then dismantled and returned to Mt Eden and reassembled to excavate the second tunnel

• The two CRL tunnels are parallel and run underneath some of the city’s most iconic areas, such as Grafton, the central motorway junction, Karangahape Road and the city centre.

• The TBM works 24/7, operated by a crew of 12 underground and a team of 12 above ground

• The TBM multi-tasks underground: excavating the tunnels, removing dirt and rocks to the surface, and installing precast concrete panels that line the tunnel walls

• At peak operation, the TBM can travel 32 metres a day

• The machine’s diameter is 7.15 metres (an adult giraffe is about six metres tall), weighs 910 tonnes (that’s roughly the combined weight of nine blue whales, the largest animal ever known to have existed), and the total length is 130 metres (a rugby field is up to 120 metres)

• The TBM was custom built for central Auckland soil conditions by the German tunnel machine company, Herrenknecht, for the Link Alliance – the group of New Zealand and international companies responsible for the main CRL contract

• To honour St Barbara, the patron saint of miners, machines working underground are traditionally named after women of significance and mana – New Zealanders helped CRL chose the name that honours Dame Whina Cooper, the Māori rights champion

• An Aotea team member gifted a hard hat painted with Dame Whina Cooper’s image to the TBM crew. The hard hat symbolises the commitment to protecting people’s health, safety and wellbeing, and the connection between each of the project’s main construction areas – Mt Eden, Karangahape and Aotea

• While the TBM is underground, people above it will feel little to no impacts. This is because it is an Earth Pressure Balanced TBM – it controls and balances the pressure of the earth it excavates which stabilises the tunnel face and reduces the possibility of settlement occurring.

And as always have a chilled day from the Vikng