First tunnel boring machine at Hamburg port
The nine-metre-long tunnel borer has a diameter of 6.17 metres and weighs a total of 320 tonnes. It will be assembled in its launch shaft on the construction site and begin boring in early July. It will start with the two switchyard tunnels between the sites Schenefeld and Osdorfer Born and then excavate the 2.1-kilometre-long tunnel for the linear accelerator between Osdorfer Born and DESY-Bahrenfeld, where it will arrive presumably in summer 2011.
The big tunnel boring machine reached the city of Hamburg today, disassembled into five parts, on the 85-metre-long freighter “Vivarium”. A 500-tonne crane awaited it at the Cruise Centre in the HafenCity district to unload the heavy cargo. On its two-week journey, which began in Kehl near Strasburg close to the manufacturing plant, the tunnel borer covered around 1200 kilometres on six different waterways: from the Rhine to the Rhine–Herne Canal, the Dortmund–Ems Canal, the Mittellandkanal, the Elbe-Seitenkanal, near Artlenburg into the Elbe and finally to the Hamburg port. Here, the parts of the machine will be stored until mid-May and then transported in two nights to the construction site Schenefeld. By then, the parts making up the 61-metre-long back-up system – which supplies the tunnel borer with the prefabricated tunnel segments, disposes of the excavated material and serves as extension of the tunnel lines – will have arrived on the construction site by truck.
