Monday, October 28, 2013

Construction update: Downtown tunnel portals, Oct. 2013

Yesterday, I checked out the construction progress of the downtown tunnel portals. We've shown photos of the construction sites taken in July, and in early and late September, most of them of the western tunnel entrance. In this construction update, both portals are featured and they were photographed on October 27, 2013.

Western Portal


One of the project signs near the western portal faces Albert Street:



A look westwards from the tunnel entrance:




Eastern Portal

Some close-ups of the trench:





The view from the fifth and fourth floors of the University of Ottawa's Simard building:




I'll post more photos in an update once the roadheaders are put to work.

6 comments:

Jim Louter said...

Great photos Peter! Also good to see the City is doing more to document progress on the Confederation Line website (about time!).

Peter Raaymakers said...

Thanks, Jim! Wes took these photos, and got some great views thanks to his willingness to climb stairs at the U of O... thanks, Wes!

Anonymous said...

I can't tell from these pictures, but it doesn't look like the trenches are wide enough to fit two train tracks. Is the tunnel only going to be wide enough to fit one train at a time?

Jim Louter said...

@ anonymous: The trench (for the western entrance anyway) is the same width as the old Wellington Street - plenty of room for twin tracks.

Jim Louter said...

There is a cool video showing the tunneling machine at work on November 8th on the LRT website: http://www.ottawalightrail.ca/en

It looks a bit amateurish to be spraying water by hand to control dust and to load rock rubble directly into a front end loader bucket but that may just have been for demonstration purposes.

Jim Louter said...

Going down Albert this morning past the construction site for the western portal and noticed quite a big pile of gray crushed rock. Looks like the type of rock removed by the tunnel excavator. Good indicator of the amount of recent tunnelling - they must be a few dozen meters in by now.