Ghella and partner achieve a second station breakthrough at Broadway Subway Project
04-17-2023
Ghella and joint venture partner ACCIONA have welcomed the first tunnel boring machine to the future Broadway-City Hall Station.
VANCOUVER, BRITISH COLUMBIA – Elsie marked another important milestone for the Broadway Subway Project on Friday, April 14, 2023, when she safely broke through into the excavation site of the future Broadway-City Hall Station.
With this feat, Elsie, the first of two tunnel-boring machines (TBMs) to launch on the project last fall, has now reached what will be the busiest and largest station on the Millennium Line SkyTrain extension.
Broadway-City Hall will also be the deepest station on the project at more than 20 metres underground, allowing the new twin tunnels to be built below the existing Canada Line. It will feature a convenient underground connection for passengers to transfer between the north-south Canada Line and the east-west Millennium Line. It will provide added capacity, including a second elevator and extra escalators, to comfortably handle passenger volumes.
Elsie will now undergo maintenance on her cutterhead after excavating more than 1,300 metres of tunnel and installing more than 900 concrete tunnel liner rings. Her next stop will be at the future Oak-VGH Station, passing the halfway point in tunnelling towards the future Arbutus Station terminus.
The second tunnel-boring machine, named after Phyllis Munday, a nurse and mountaineer who founded the Girl Guides in British Columbia, will relaunch from Mount Pleasant Station next week. Phyllis is expected to breakthrough at Broadway-City Hall this spring. With the departure of both tunnel-boring machines from Mount Pleasant Station, and the completion of the station foundation, crews will turn their focus to building the station’s interior walls.
While people travel above, work on the five new SkyTrain stations along Broadway continues below ground. The new line is being tunneled underground with traffic decks and special pedestrian bridges installed in the station blocks, ensuring Broadway is kept open and access is maintained to businesses, health services and residences throughout construction.
Concrete pours to complete the station foundation are ongoing at Broadway-City Hall and set to begin at the remaining stations along Broadway. At the east end of the project, more than half of the concrete girders connecting the 21 columns between VCC-Clark Station and the future Great Northern Way-Emily Carr Station have been installed.
The Broadway Subway Project will extend the Millennium Line 5.7 kilometres from VCC-Clark Station to West Broadway and Arbutus Street, providing people with fast, convenient SkyTrain service along the Broadway corridor. The corridor is home to B.C.’s second-largest jobs centre, world-class health-care services, an emerging innovation and research hub, and growing residential communities.
