Roadheader excavating rock in the huge undersea UK Crossover on the Channel Tunnel project, 8kms from the English coast.
A roadheader is a piece of excavating equipment consisting of a boom-mounted cutting head, a loading device usually involving a conveyor and a crawler travelling track to move the entire machine forward into the rock face. During the construction of the Channel Tunnel under the sea, two vast Crossovers were constructed about 8 kilometres from the UK and the French coasts. These were the largest undersea caverns ever built (156m long, wide and high) and allow trains in the two rail tunnels to switch from track to track to facilitate maintenance. The UK Crossover was built by using the New Austrian Tunnelling Method (NATM) that was considered to be fast, flexible and cost-effective - the cavern was built in just seven months. The Channel Tunnel is no ordinary project. The four types of cross-channel service that the Tunnel offers - conventional freight and passenger trains, plus two types of road vehicle shuttle have made it into the busiest railway in the world. The fast and efficient movement of road and rail traffic into, through and out of the Eurotunnel system is integral to that success. The Channel Tunnel is one of the wonders of the modern world. It is thirty-two miles long at an average depth of 45 metres below the sea-bed, the longest undersea tunnel and the second longest rail tunnel in the world (only the Seikan Tunnel in Japan is longer). It was built between 1987 and 1994 by Anglo-French consortium TransManche Link and is owned and operated by Anglo-French Eurotunnel plc. It opened for business in late 1994, offering services including a shuttle train for car, coach and freight vehicles, a Eurostar high-speed passenger service linking London with Paris and Brussels and a rail freight service. The tunnel boring machines were specially designed for excavating the chalk marl rock which lies beneath the seabed along the tunnel route. Digging the tunnel took 15 thousand workers around 170 million man-hours over 7 years.
Size: 3304px × 3304px
Location: 40m under sea bed, 8kms from Dover, Europe.
Photo credit: © qaphotos.com / Alamy / Afripics
License: Licensed
Model Released: No
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