Herrenknecht AG

In the Italian construction lot "Mauls 2-3" of the Brenner Base Tunnel, three Herrenknecht tunnel boring machines (TBMs) are boring from south to north. They are excavating the two main tubes as well as an exploratory and later service tunnel 12 meters below. In March 2021, a new record was set by one of these three machines: the Double Shield TBM (Ø 10.65 meters) named "Virginia" covered 860 meters in one month. The contracting joint venture BTC S.c.a.r.l. (Astaldi S.p.A., Ghella S.p.A., P.A.C. S.p.A. and Cogeis S.p.A.) thus achieved a peak advance rate at the Mauls jobsite. For March 2021, the Brenner Base Tunnel project owner, Austrian-Italian BBT SE, announced an average daily advance rate of 27.7 meters for "Virginia". The daily best performance was 36.75 meters.

What makes a city worth living in? How do people want to live in metropolises that are getting increasingly larger and more complex? Already more than half the world's population lives in cities. By 2050 it is expected to be seven out of ten billion people. But space is limited – making it worth living in nevertheless is our greatest task in the 21st century. And so plans for this are being drawn up around the world. They make it clear that a hitherto neglected dimension is increasingly coming to the fore: the underground.