Ship sets sail carrying components for Scarborough TBM
30 November 2021Jumbo Vision, the appropriately named ship with a jumbo cargo, has left European shores, setting its sights on Canada where it will deliver the parts for a Herrenknecht TBM that will bore Toronto’s Scarborough Subway Extension.
On November 26, the machine began its journey of more than 6,300km to the launch shaft in Toronto, having recently passed its factory acceptance testing at the Herrenknecht facility in Schwanau, Germany. This was followed by dismantling and packing into shipping containers for transportation on barges from Kehl up the Rhine River to the Dutch port of Westdorpe.
The two-week voyage will take the machine across the Atlantic, into the St Lawrence Seaway, Canada, and to the port of Oshawa on Lake Ontario. From there, the containers will be trucked to the launch site at McCowan Road and Sheppard Avenue East where TBM re-assembly will begin. The machine is due to be lowered into a launch shaft – mostly excavated – measuring 80m long, 30m wide and 25m deep in spring 2022.
Lying within an area known as the South Slope, the tunnel alignment will comprise soft ground made up of mainly glacial till and interglacial granular, with a mix of sand, clay and small boulders. Since last year, transportation provider Metrolinx has drilled over 100 boreholes along the project route at depths ranging from 10-60m.
The TBM is anticipated to advance at rates of around 10m/day. It will bore a single, 10.7m-diameter tunnel for the three-stop 7.8km Scarborough Subway Extension (SSE) which, for its entire length, will run underground. It will be the first subway project in Toronto to operate in both directions within a single tube.
The three-stop SSE will extend Toronto Transit Commission’s Line 2 subway service approximately 7.8km further into Scarborough, providing seamless, reliable transit to key areas in Toronto’s eastern hub.
