[URBAN NOTE] On the emergent Eglinton Crosstown light rail route

[rfmcdonald]

Transit Toronto's Robert Mackenzie shared the news that work has begun on boring the tunnel for the new Eglinton Crosstown line, a light rail route to parallel Eglinton Avenue.

Yesterday, Tuesday, April 8, Ontario Transportation Minister Glen Murray, member of provincial parliament Laura Albanese and Metrolinx Chief Executive Offer Bruce McCuaig joined a tour of the construction site for the future Eglinton - Scarborough Crosstown light rail transit line. They received a close-up view of a tunnel-boring machine (TBM) and learned about the contractors’ progress in assembling the TBM.

Four TBMs will build the the tunnels for the underground portion of the line. The machines work in pairs, with one pair tunneling the west portion from Black Creek Drive to Yonge Street, and the other tunneling the east portion from Yonge Street to Don Mills Road.

With trailer gear, each TBM is about 81m (243 feet) long and weighs 511,000 kilograms (563 tons). Moving all the components requires dozens of truckloads. Caterpillar, a Toronto company that also build the TBMs for extending the TTC’s 1 Yonge - University - Spadina subway beyond Downsview, built the TBMs for the Crosstown. Metrolinx purchased the machines in 2010 for a total cost of $54 million.

The first pieces of the TBMs arrived at the launch site near Black Creek in late February. Crews will assemble the TMMs in the launch shaft. The machines will drill eastward, creating tunnels 6.5 metres (20 feet) in diameter, at a rate of about 10 metres (30 feet) a day.

The Toronto Star's Tess Kalinowski has a nice article examining how some residents along Eglinton hope that the new line will aid in a renewal of the strip. (It would have been personally convenient for me if the Eglinton subway hadn't been cancelled in 1995, I have to say.)

By the time the line opens in 2020, the businesses and residents along the avenue will have been waiting 25 years for the urban renewal that was stopped when former Progressive Conservative premier Mike Harris ordered crews to fill in the hole of the first Eglinton subway. It was supposed to run from Eglinton West Station to the airport.

“I don’t care if they flood Eglinton and run gondolas on it, I’ve been waiting 30 years,” says Liberal MPP Mike Colle, who remembers the anger when the subway was stopped.

Businesses had already died where construction crews had torn up the road to begin pile driving and preparing track.

Paul Christie, who was TTC chair in 1995, heard the news of the cancellation on the golf course, while listening to a provincial budget update on his Walkman. “This was pretty dramatic stuff,” he said.

When the subway was cancelled, “they cut the pilings, effectively destroying any chance of picking up the work where it was left,” he said.

Next week, construction crews will begin removing those piles to make way for the LRT.