{"id":881530,"date":"2026-09-06T00:58:12","date_gmt":"2026-09-06T00:58:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/881530\/"},"modified":"2026-09-06T00:58:12","modified_gmt":"2026-09-06T00:58:12","slug":"crews-cut-a-cavern-147-feet-under-a-sydney-cricket-ground-and-bolted-263-pieces-into-a-boring-machine-down-there-and-the-finished-thing-weighs-as-much-as-88-double-decker-buses","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/881530\/","title":{"rendered":"Crews cut a cavern 147 feet under a Sydney cricket ground and bolted 263 pieces into a boring machine down there, and the finished thing weighs as much as 88 double decker buses"},"content":{"rendered":"

There is a cricket ground in an inner Sydney suburb where people have played for generations. Nothing on the surface says anything at all.<\/p>\n

Under it sits a chamber\u00a092 feet high, cut out of sandstone.<\/p>\n

Inside it sits a machine that could never have been driven, craned or floated in\u00a0as one piece.<\/p>\n

So it was\u00a0built down there\u00a0instead, bolt by bolt, in the hole it would later leave through.<\/p>\n

Why the build sequence had to run backwards<\/p>\n

A bore this wide rules out every normal delivery. No road takes it, no surface crane lifts it, and no shaft on the site is wide enough to drop it through.<\/p>\n

That inverts the usual order of work. The hole gets excavated first, the machine arrives in crates, and the crates become a machine in place.<\/p>\n

Each unit here broke down into\u00a0263 major parts. Those were lowered into twin launch chambers under the oval and reassembled with\u00a0500 ton cranes\u00a0working in a space with very little room to spare, which the state government described as an engineering feat never attempted at this scale in the country before.<\/p>\n

Only when the last bolt is torqued does the thing exist as a machine at all.<\/p>\n

By then it is already pointed the way it has to travel, and there is\u00a0no reversing out. It drives forward, and the only exit is the far end of the tunnel.<\/p>\n

The machine measured against things a person can stand beside<\/p>\n

The cutting face spans a little over fifty one feet across. That is roughly the height of a five story building stood on end.<\/p>\n

The body runs about\u00a0371 feet\u00a0on its own and closer to 449 counting the trailing gear behind it. The whole train is longer than a football field with both end zones attached.<\/p>\n

The cutterhead by itself weighs around\u00a0509 tons, and the complete machine comes in above\u00a0nine million pounds, which is where the comparison to eighty eight double decker buses comes from.<\/p>\n

Up to forty people work on each one, around the clock, seven days a week. It is a\u00a0factory floor\u00a0that happens to be moving.<\/p>\n

What the caverns and the geology demanded<\/p>\n

Two launch chambers were cut beneath the oval, each tall enough to swallow twenty two Olympic pools. Both sit roughly\u00a0147 feet down.<\/p>\n

\"SheepOther top storyAcross 162 square miles of high desert panels on the Tibetan Plateau the grass grew so tall it began shading the glass, and the fix the operators settled on arrived on four legs<\/a><\/p>\n

Across the wider project more than five million tons of rock and spoil have already come out of the ground. That figure is for the excavation alone.<\/p>\n

The material varies far more than the surface suggests. Hawkesbury sandstone runs to several thousand pounds per square inch, the harbour sediment above it offers almost none of that resistance, and a cutter set for one is\u00a0wrong for the other.<\/p>\n

That is why tools get inspected and swapped by\u00a0robotic systems\u00a0inside the head, rather than sending people into a pressurized chamber to do it by hand.<\/p>\n

Beneath the water the tunnel reaches about\u00a0164 feet\u00a0below sea level. Deep enough that nothing above it is disturbed.<\/p>\n

The record it set, and the one it did not<\/p>\n

The machine rolled off a production line in\u00a0a Zhengzhou yard\u00a0in the spring of last year.<\/p>\n

The manufacturer called it a new record for the\u00a0largest excavation bore\u00a0of any Chinese built tunneling machine shipped to another country, and\u00a0the export record<\/a>\u00a0stands on that specific wording.<\/p>\n

It is\u00a0not the largest\u00a0ever built. Wider machines exist, and they are working at home rather than abroad, which is a distinction the coverage keeps losing.<\/p>\n

Two claims do hold and are worth keeping straight. This is the\u00a0largest ever assembled underground, and the largest ever put to work in the Southern Hemisphere.<\/p>\n

\"AOther top storyA blade section weighing 3.5 tons spent its working life above a Colorado wind farm, and it lies on its side in an Atlanta park carrying the first footbridge of its kind in the country<\/a><\/p>\n

Chinese builders have taken this route before, including the shield that ran seven miles under the Yangtze in\u00a0a single pass<\/a>\u00a0without ever surfacing.<\/p>\n

What is left to cut<\/p>\n

There are\u00a0two machines\u00a0here rather than one. Both carry names drawn from the harbour\u2019s own history.<\/p>\n

The drive beneath the water runs about a mile. It forms the last section of a tunnel roughly four miles long between two sides of the city.<\/p>\n

Behind the cutting face, around\u00a0thirteen thousand\u00a0precast concrete segments line the bore as it advances, and\u00a0the caverns<\/a>\u00a0that made the assembly possible will eventually be backfilled and forgotten.<\/p>\n

Heavy plant at this scale keeps hitting the same wall, whether it is a\u00a031 million pounds<\/a>\u00a0excavator on a soft mine floor or a\u00a0boring machine\u00a0under a suburb. Getting it to the work is harder than the work.<\/p>\n

The oval goes back afterward. It will be regraded and returned to play once the machines are gone, and the only permanent record above ground will be a road nobody can see.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"There is a cricket ground in an inner Sydney suburb where people have played for generations. Nothing on…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":881531,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[564],"tags":[64,63,740,85],"class_list":["post-881530","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-cricket","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-cricket","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/881530","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=881530"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/881530\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/881531"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=881530"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=881530"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=881530"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}