The first of the two massive TBMs, named Bella, was sent on its journey boring under Melbourne’s western suburbs to build the alternative to the West Gate Bridge.

This is a milestone for one of the important projects of Melbourne besieged with problems since the beginning. The West Gate Tunnel Project aims to ease congestion on the West Gate Freeway and West Gate Bridge by building a twin-tube tunnel Yarra river crossing as an alternative to the bridge and also by widening the West Gate Freeway from 8 lanes to 12 lanes.

The $6.7 billion  project was scheduled to start in July 2019 and finish by 2022. A dispute between the operator Transurban and the contractors over who would pick the bill for the handling of the contaminated soil did go nasty with contractors abandoning the project. After some legal fight at courts and and much pressure from the Victorian government, Transurban and the contractors have come up with a new agreement costing the taxpayers extra billions of dollars. All in all, the latest estimates put the cost at 11 billion dollars with a 4 billion dollar cost increase from this dispute... Project completion date is also delayed by around 2 years.

The contractors of the project are CPB Contractors (owned by Spanish CMIC -as was recently in the news for allegedly stealing from workers pays in Middle East) and John Holland (owned by Chinese CCCC - China Communications Construction Coprporation).

The second TBM for the project, named Vida, will soon begin work on the 2.8km inbound tunnel. The TBMs are 15.6m in diameter and 90m long. Each of them weigh 4000 tonnes.

https://bigbuild.vic.gov.au/news/west-gate-tunnel-project/australias-largest-tunnelling-machine-starts-digging-the-west-gate-tunnel