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Transportation Businesses

The Boring Company's First Tunnel Is All Dug Up (arstechnica.com) 187

Elon Musk has tweeted images of his tunnel-boring machine with the caption "Congratulations @BoringCompany on completing the LA/Hawthorne tunnel! Cutting edge technology!" The update comes a couple weeks after Musk showed off the Boring Company's LA tunnel and said it was "on track" for an opening party on December 10th. Ars Technica reports: The tunnel appears to end at what The Boring Company calls "O'Leary Station," which is located on a piece of commercial property that The Boring Company purchased in Hawthorne. This location is close to, but not the same as, the location for which The Boring Company recently received approval to build a tunnel entrance within a residential garage. "O'Leary Station" references a SpaceX/Boring Company employee who recently passed away. The Hawthorne tunnel is just a test tunnel for The Boring Company, which also plans to complete a second, 3.6-mile, one-way tunnel from Los Angeles Metro to Dodger Stadium. Eventually, the company wants to dig a tunnel in Chicago between O'Hare International Airport and the city's downtown.
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The Boring Company's First Tunnel Is All Dug Up

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  • by SuricouRaven ( 1897204 ) on Sunday November 18, 2018 @06:19AM (#57662864)

    It's a standard TBM. Making a tunnel. Cool, yes, but what's the advancement here? Is is any faster or cheaper than existing tunnel-making machines? Can it make smaller tunnels, which could be quite valuable in urban areas? Why all the excitement?

    • by Anonymous Coward

      In fact, it is an existing TBM. Elon simply bought one.

      • by K. S. Kyosuke ( 729550 ) on Sunday November 18, 2018 @06:30AM (#57662888)
        You have to start with existing equipment before you find out what's wrong with it. Isn't that how it usually works?
        • by Rei ( 128717 ) on Sunday November 18, 2018 @06:42AM (#57662928) Homepage

          Indeed. They're not magically jumping straight to Prufrock. Godot is mostly (but not entirely) standard. Prufrock is their target, which involves continuous casing, hot swappable cutting discs, and much faster head speeds. Linestorm is intermediary between them.

          Godot is operational now. Linestorm is under construction. Prufrock is in design.

          • Damn. You really are a Musk fanboy. Who the hell knows the NAMES of the machines? For chrissake.
            • Damn. You really are a Musk fanboy. Who the hell knows the NAMES of the machines? For chrissake.

              Damn. You really are a whiner. Who complains about people knowing the NAMES of the machines? For chrissake.

              • Damn. You really are a whiner. Who complains about people knowing the NAMES of the machines? For chrissake.

                Quite. He basically comes here and shit talks everything. It's a way some people use to try and sounds smart when they actually know very little at all.

            • Who the hell knows the NAMES of the machines?

              Uh...presumably anyone who bothered to watch one of the company's presentations?

    • by Gavagai80 ( 1275204 ) on Sunday November 18, 2018 @08:23AM (#57663046) Homepage

      The fact that it makes much smaller tunnels than standard boring machines is a large part of the cost-saving strategy (although not the only part). The Loop going into it on which people will travel up to 150 MPH is notable for being optimized to work in small spaces, as opposed to subway trains.

      Basically, Elon found that small tunnels have drastic cost savings which can make them economical to build many more of... if they have a use. So he got some engineers to design a transport system (Loop, not Hyperloop) which can fit into what we can afford to tunnel. And that's how The Boring Company was born, although they also have a bunch of other theoretical cost reduction ideas largely drawn from SpaceX strategies.

      • Forget about the loop aspect - smaller tunnels alone could be very useful indeed in urban areas. They can transport people on foot from A to a nearby B in a mostly-straight line, without having to weave around buildings or wait to cross traffic - and if A happens to be a subway station, you've just found a way to make subways substantially more attractive. The trick is getting the cost of drilling tunnels down low enough that it becomes practical for a subway station to have a spider-web of pedestrian tunn

      • by 140Mandak262Jamuna ( 970587 ) on Sunday November 18, 2018 @09:07AM (#57663112) Journal
        The standard tunnel boring machine uses diesel engines. The boring company is using electric motors and battery packs to power the drill head. That is where the innovation and technology comes in. Tesla cars have the same four wheels and the body and the steering. Is it same as an gasoline car?

        The diesel engine in confined space will asphyxiate the workers. Supplying air and taking away the exhaust is a very complex operation, adding to the costs. Especially on long tunnels.

        Having said that, competition will catch up quickly. They can house the diesel engines at the entrance or tap into the grid and send power by cables to the drill head. Not sure how feasible it would be though. Also looks like the boring company is planning on autonomous self driving tubs to take the tilings away and to bring fresh batteries. This too could reduce the cost of tunneling. Again, other can easily copy.

        Tunneling has changed for ever. Whether The Boring Company will get a big slice of the market and windfall, I am not sure. But 20 years from now, all tunnel boring ops will be like what the boring company is doing now.

        • Columbus, OH was using electric boring machines in 2010 [ecmag.com]. Electric power for underground operations is hardly a new concept...
          • by Rei ( 128717 ) on Sunday November 18, 2018 @12:43PM (#57663616) Homepage

            There's some confusion here. As a general rule, TBMs are powered by high voltage lines carrying a couple megawatts of power. Diesel-powered trains carry the spoils away, where conveyors are not used. Powering a TBM with HV lines requires laying the lines, a quite expensive affair that TBC is replacing with hot-swapped battery packs (simple calculations show that it should only take about half a million dollars in batteries), carried in and out by the spoils trains. Diesel trains require powerful ventilation systems, for obvious reasons, which are also another significant capital cost which is eliminated by the use of battery-powered electric trains.

            • by Rei ( 128717 )

              As a point of comparison, compare half a million dollars in batteries vs. what your article cites for the power line work:

              Royal Electric arrived on-site in November 2010, with an $8 million contract, as sub for general contractor Kenny Construction (acquired by Granite Construction in December 2012), according to Rodger Dalton, Royal’s project superintendent. Royal has already done similar projects in the past and has a crew specialized and trained to manage the TBM-related tasks.

              “There is a gre

            • Thanks for the clarification. I seem to have misunderstood the technology. I thought the TBM itself was diesel powered. Looks like the tiling removing trucks/trains are diesel powered. Thanks.
            • by Jeremi ( 14640 )

              Powering a TBM with HV lines requires laying the lines, a quite expensive affair

              I'm sure this has been thought of before, but if the eventual use of your tunnel is going to require high-voltage lines anyway (e.g. to power the sleds that will move the cars around underground), then installing those power lines up-front for your digger to use might be considered a freebie, since you were going to have to install them eventually anyway.

        • You got half the advancement. The other half is incredibly deep expertise with alloy performance in extreme environments from the work done by SpaceX. While going electric and buying Tesla battery packs will indeed allow the competition to catch up to that part of the boring quickly, the potential for them to redesign the cutting heads and cooling system drawing on SpaceX's rocket engine research is something that nobody is going to catch up to quickly, if The Boring Company can make a real advance in that

      • The fact that it makes much smaller tunnels than standard boring machines is a large part of the cost-saving strategy

        It might be - if it actually was a fact.

      • The fact that it makes much smaller tunnels than standard boring machines is a large part of the cost-saving strategy (although not the only part). The Loop going into it on which people will travel up to 150 MPH is notable for being optimized to work in small spaces, as opposed to subway trains.

        While the speed sounds impressive - previous articles have indicated that the Loop can only carry a fraction of the passengers per hour that a conventional subway can carry.

        So, to do what you didn't do (answer the g

        • Damn, that sucks. If only they were working on a technology to cheaply bore tunnels, so they could make up for a lack of serial performance by making a lot of parallel lines.

          • What's the point in making more tunnels if you slow them down by inefficient pod systems?

            • Pods are efficient because it can get rid of manual transfers. They can go the whole way to whatever destination.

          • Damn, that sucks. If only they were working on a technology to cheaply bore tunnels, so they could make up for a lack of serial performance by making a lot of parallel lines.

            Good luck with finding the space for lots of parallel lines. I have been involved with building new London Underground lines, and a big problem is avoiding the existing network of underground railway tunnels, sewers, electric cable tunnels, deep foundation buildings, and ducted underground rivers; plus geological issues. A single larger bore tunnel takes up less footprint than several smaller bore tunnels of the same total capacity.

          • If only they were working on a technology to cheaply bore tunnels, so they could make up for a lack of serial performance by making a lot of parallel lines.

            One of those things that sound impressive to the generally clueless "because Elon!" crowd... But which makes very little sense when you do the math. (Hint: When you have to drill twenty plus tunnels and ten times the surface infrastructure - you aren't going to end up saving much money.)

      • Elon found that small tunnels have drastic cost savings which can make them economical to build many more of...

        So Musk found it cheaper to bore smaller tunnels. What a genius.

        That gem of wisdom was also followed by the early London Underground railways, until they discovered what a mistake it was. Today there are abandoned tunnels [leverton.org] under London that have been replaced by larger ones. The new Crossrail London underground line is being bored for full-sized trains.

    • The main advancement is in the cost savings .

      Most standard TBMs are diesel powered. They need oxygen to run. Supplying oxygen to the machine and ventilation fans is a major cost of the standard tunnel boring operations. If you are planning to dig tunnels several miles long, this is a very serious issue. The boring company is using electric motors and batteries. Savings come from: 1 much smaller ventilation system. 2. diesel is four times more expensive than batteries. [*]

      Second innovation comes with auton

      • Electric boring machines were in service in 2010 [ecmag.com], 6 years before The Boring Company was founded. This is nothing new.
    • by Ogive17 ( 691899 )
      Well - I'm assuming it is cheaper as it's not some government contracted project.
    • No cutting edge tools were used to build this tunnel. The boring machines were purchased from other projects, was even more expensive than other tunnels in a dollars per mile routine.

    • probably not new, but for sure it is boring...
    • Why all the excitement?

      Finally got some good drainage... oh wait, is this thing below sea level?

    • It's a standard TBM. Making a tunnel. Cool, yes, but what's the advancement here? Is is any faster or cheaper than existing tunnel-making machines? Can it make smaller tunnels, which could be quite valuable in urban areas? Why all the excitement?

      It's a Hyper-Tunnel!

  • Sounds more like a drug runner's tunnel
  • Title says it all.
    • Converting fleets to electric vehicles directly impact both of these as fleet operators are able to utilize lower cost electricity to power their vehicles, thus eliminating both the overhead expense of diesel and the demand on the ventilation system.

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