Out of the box Digging tunnels at a lower cost
Cities need to build tunnels for trains, roads and other purposes. 

It used to be very costly to build a tunnel. With giant boring machines, called TBM (tunnel boring machines), the cost can reduce significantly.

I quote from this article in 2016:

The savings from automation can be dramatic. The MTA recently had to manually dig a particularly difficult 120-foot tunnel at a cost of almost $1 million per foot. By contrast, tunneling 3 miles under Second Avenue with giant machines cost about $19,000 per foot.

Source:
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/the-high-tech-low-cost-world-of-tunnel-building-2016-05-10

Apart from reducing cost, the use of the TBM allows the tunnel to be completed in a much shorter time (one tenth of the time), compared to manual digging. 

I read an article that explains the boring machine is able to take the materials that are excavated and used them to produce bricks that are used to line the tunnel. I am looking for that article to explain this process.

Tan Kin Lian


 

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