While workers in Seattle prepare for Bertha’s restart later this month, another tunnel boring machine in the city made news late last week after it reached its destination and broke through at the future site of a train station.
In a video posted by The Seattle Times, tunnel boring machine Brenda can be seen breaking through the last few feet of the light-rail tunnel segment from Northgate to the University District Station on Nov. 6. Helping Brenda get through the last bit of the tunnel is a CASE Construction excavator.
The tunnel boring machine will now undergo four to six weeks of maintenance and will then resume digging south toward Husky Stadium to finish the northbound subway tunnel, according to a Sound Transit spokesperson in the paper's story.
The $2.1 billion, 4.3-mile Northgate Link extension is designed to provide a 14-minute ride between Northgate and downtown, and attract 60,000 daily passengers by 2030, Sound Transit says. Sound Transit says the project is still on schedule for trains to serve Northgate by September 2021.
Brenda is one-seventh the size of tunnel boring machine Bertha, which is slated to resume digging on Nov. 23.
