Construction on Vancouver’s Broadway subway has reached another milestone, with the first of two tunnel-boring machines breaking through to the Broadway-City Hall transit station.
In a media release Friday, the Ministry of Transportation and Infrastructure said the massive piece of equipment breached the station construction site Friday afternoon.
The Broadway-City Hall station is being expended from its current form, which serves the Canada Line, to include the subway and will be the largest and busiest station on the Millennium Line extension.
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Passengers will be able to connect between the two lines underground, and the station will be upgraded to include more capacity, a second elevator and more escalators to handle the increased volume.
The machine is named Elsie after Elizabeth ‘Elsie’ MacGill, who was the world’s first female aeronautical engineer and professional aircraft designer and was born in B.C.
It is scheduled to undergo maintenance on its cutterhead, before being relocated to the west side of the station to continue tunnelling towards the future Oak-VGH station. Breakthrough at that site will mark its arrival at the halfway point of the 5.7 kilometre Millennium Line extension.
The second tunnel-boring machine, which recently broke through at the Mount Pleasant Station site, is named Phyllis after Phyllis Munday, who was a noted mountaineer who founded Girl Guides in B.C. and the province’s first St. John Ambulances Brigade in North Vancouver. It is slated to re-launch for the dig to Broadway-City Hall station next week.
The finished project will see the Millennium Line extended from its current terminus at VCC-Clark to Arbutus Street, with an initial cost estimate of $2.8 billion.
A future expansion from Arbutus Street to UBC is supported by the City of Vancouver, UBC and the TransLink Mayor’s Council, but has not secured funding.