Five years after work began on the Metro Tunnel, the third and fourth TBMs are being assembled before starting work on Victoria’s biggest public transport project.
TBMs Millie and Alice – named after Victoria’s first female MP and a First World War hero – are being assembled at the site of the new Anzac Station under St Kilda Road.
Over the coming months, each TBM piece will be lowered into the station box. When the two machines will be assembled and tested, and the station box is fully excavated, the TBMs will begin digging towards the Metro Tunnel’s eastern entrance in South Yarra.
The project’s first two TBMs, Joan and Meg have also been busy – tunnelling from Arden Station to Kensington since September 2019, lining the new tunnel with more than 5,000 concrete segments.
The TBM retrieval shaft in Kensington is almost complete and it will be flooded in order for their first TBM, Joan, to break through and form the first section of the Metro Tunnel.
State Library Station
The station cavern has also been excavated for State Library station 36 m under Swanston Street, and support structures and a roof slab have been built for the tunnel’s eastern entrance at South Yarra. Work starting on the permanent station.
The cavern under the CBD has been excavated using three road headers, each of which can excavate around 500 t of rock every day.
The station, between Franklin and La Trobe Streets, will be 240 m long and 30 m wide. Its 19-m platforms will be some of the widest underground metro platforms in the world.
State Library and Town Hall stations feature trinocular caverns – three overlapping tunnels dug by road headers to create an open space for passengers, allowing the concourse and platforms to be integrated on one level.
The State Library Station will include an underground passenger connection to Melbourne Central Station, so passengers can easily change between Metro Tunnel and City Loop train services. Later this year, road headers will go back underground to dig out the rail tunnels on each side of the Cntral Station cavern. Shafts have been dug for State Library and Town Hall stations at City Square, A’Beckett Street and Franklin Street.
Six massive temporary acoustic sheds have been built across the city to minimise noise, light and dust for Melburnians as crews work around the clock on the tunnels, and 1.8 km of new track has been laid – which will allow the tunnels to connect to the existing Cranbourne/Pakenham lines.
When finished, the Andrews Labor Government’s Metro Tunnel will create capacity for more than a half-a-million extra passengers per week across Melbourne’s train network during peak periods, and slash travel times.
Click here for a video on the State Library Station update, here and au/32 for the tunnelbuilder archive. Visit https://metrotunnel.vic.gov.au/ and https://www.premier.vic.gov.au . 08/20.
