The NSW City & Southwest Metro Project has hit a new milestone with 50 per cent completion of the tunnelling as another mega boring machine broke through into the new Crows Nest Station.
NSW Minister for Transport, Andrew Constance, said Tunnel Boring Machine (TBM) Mabel’s cutterhead broke through a wall of rock at the new Crows Nest Station site just four weeks after TBM Wendy arrived.
“This is incredible progress on the next stage of Sydney Metro – City & Southwest, with close to 14.5km of tunnel already built.
“We’ve already seen the success of North West Metro and once the next stage of this game-changing project opens, there will be turn-up-and-go Metro train services to 31 stations along a new 66km railway.”
Since launching in February this year, TBM Mabel has excavated about 290,000 tonnes of sandstone and shale – enough to fill more than 45 Olympic size swimming pools.
Mabel will spend a few weeks undergoing maintenance before being re-launched at Crows Nest and tunnelling towards the next future Sydney Metro station at North Sydney.
TBM Mabel and TBM Wendy are building 6.2km of tunnel, which will link the recently opened North West Metro at Chatswood to the harbour’s edge at Blues Point.
The borer is named after Mabel Newill, a matron at Royal Prince Alfred Hospital (RPAH), who introduced sanitisation techniques to help stop the spread of typhoid in Sydney in the early 1900s.
