On 11.06.2016, following more than 1.5 years of underground work, the TBM Victoria, 1800 ton in weight, 115 m long and with a 10m diameter officially breakthrough on the south tube of the Ejpovice tunnel. The tunnel portal was in close proximity to Pilsen’s borough of Doubravka on the Prague - Pilsen railway. The event was attended by officials representing the Railway Infrastructure Administration, State Fund for Transport Infrastructure and the contractors – Metrostav and Subterra.
The Ejpovice Tunnel is 2 single-track tunnel tubes which are 4,150 m long. It will be the longest railway tunnel in the Czech Republic. It’s a key structure on the Rokycany-Pilsen railway line, which belongs to the trans-European core transport network and to the domestic Third Railway Transit Corridor, which connects Prague with Pilsen and Cheb, and from there leads as far as the Czech border with Germany. Once the entire line has been upgraded, traveling from the Czech capital to Pilsen will take less than an hour and trains will be able to travel at speeds from 120 to 160 km/hour. Currently, a train journey between the two cities takes one hour and 35 minutes.
The TBM, had been scheduled to finish in November 2015 but during excavation it encountered some difficulties caused by unexpected geological conditions in the ground beneath the Homolka and Chlum hills. There was hard spilite rock, abnormal amounts of inflowing water and unstable rocks and quartz veins in slate.
TBM Victoria will now be partly disassembled, refurbished, and brought back to Kysice, where the boring of the second tube of the tunnel will begin in the Autumn. Victoria is a convertible TBM, it can bore through both soft soil and solid rock. The maximum daily progress achieved during the boring of the Ejpovice Tunnel was 32 m. The machine creates a completely finished tunnel with walls built from concrete rings composed of 7+1 segments. Each ring is 2 m wide and 0.4 m thick. The rings were manufactured in Dysina, approximately 2 km from the construction site. More than 2000 rings are needed for each of the tubes of the tunnel. For further information please click here and here for videos of the breakthrough. Visit http://www.metrostav.cz/ and http://www.subterra.cz/. 24/16.
