For a massive HSR net, now half finished, tunnels are being carved out by a fleet of giant tunnel-boring machines, affectionately given Thomas the Tank Engine-esque names like Dorothy, Florence, and Cecilia. These incredible machines act like underground factories — they dig the tunnel, line it with concrete segments, and keep moving forward at an impressive clip of up to 16 meters (over 52 feet) per day.
Maybe they could speed up building infrastructure here?
Two questions: 1. How much do they cost? 2. What kind of material are they cutting through at a rate of 16 meters per day?
Here are the price ranges for some of the leading TBM brands:
Herrenknecht AG: $5 million – $30 million
The Robbins Company: $10 million – $40 million
Wirth GmbH: $20 million – $100 million +
Qinhuangdao Tianye Tolian: $15 million – $20 million
Terratec: $10 million – $20 million
Hitachi: $5 million – $10 million
I believe the substrata varies.
Sad that The Boring Company is not listed, or has product or services/support to promote…
Something I have been waiting to see promoted is a proper modular construction for this type of machine – apparently very often it’s more cost-effective to scrap or ‘entomb’ the machine itself when the job is finished, rather than relocate it to the ‘next’ prospective boring job.
This goes hand-in-hand with better infrastructure for self-launching viaduct construction, subgrade improvement, and TLMs… the latter being something that I think should be promoted here as an upgrade from the current methods of track reconstruction. Once you have TLMs operated the way we currently employ Loram-style grinding trains… some of the stranded capital costs look less and less significant.
We’ll never, ever, ever have a functional second spine without extensive equipment of precisely the sort the Chinese have been using over the past couple of decades. Whether or not we buy it from them or give them a taste of their own technology-transfer policies…
Unfair practices, for sure, but one wonders if we would have already had the Cal HSR up and running at a fraction of current cost if we had simply swallowed our costly, senseless pride and let someone with the know-how build it?
I frankly think we should have adopted the ‘right’ parts of Chinese practices as soon as it was clear they could be scaled – the viaducts, the track, the catenary infrastructure.
We would have had large parts of CAHSR built out, and not with the BS single-tracking, long before now. Although a great number of ‘consultants’ would not have been happy to see it actually get done.
I admit I’d prefer Japanese rolling stock and electrical gear in that timeframe (China had a hard start designing effective HSR equipment in the early 2000s). I believe the current production of their equipment has reasonable build quality… when overseen by American ‘site engineers’ in a build-American facility.
duplicate
I think we could learn a lot from those with more experience building and running and maintaining HSR and HrSR.