WATCHING the 118 tonne tunnel borer named in your honour slice into rock deep under city streets is "pretty fun", a Bendigo-raised engineer says.
Subscribe now for unlimited access.
$0/
(min cost $0)
or signup to continue reading
Jane Sitch has watched her namesake - a 15 metre-long roadheader - grind ever closer to the first major breakthrough of Melbourne's Metro Tunnel project for nearly a year.
"It is tradition in tunnelling to name the machines after females," the site engineer said.
"We had seven roadheaders coming to the CBD for the project and one of the other workers nominated my name for the first roadheader. It's just kind of escalated from there.
"For myself, and the other three engineers in the CBD's north who have machines named after them, it's a really nice recognition and an honour."
Jane (the roadheader) is one of three excavating caverns and underground passages under Swanston Street, near Franklin Street, for the new State Library Station.
The roadheaders have chewed through about 20 per cent of the train station so far.
Metro Tunnel workers celebrated linking two tunnels last week when a roadheader burst through a rock wall 30 metres underground.
State transport infrastructure minister Jacinta Allan said the moment was the culmination of months of hard work.
"These giant roadheaders have been working day and night underground, building the Metro Tunnel - to run more trains, more often, across Melbourne."
More stories:
Ms Sitch was on the other side of the wall the moment a roadheader broke through.
"When the tunnel machine starts cutting it's a very large noise. There's lots of rumbling as it breaks through the ground," she said.
"We stood there in silence and it got louder and louder. We started seeing cracks in the shotcrete we put up to stabilise the wall.
"Then it punched through like you'd imagine a fist would."
There is still more work to do on the Metro Tunnel.
In total, three gargantuan machines will help dig up more than 500,000 tonnes of rock and soil. It is the equivalent of 70 Olympic-size swimming pools.
Excavators are now making the tunnel eight metres deeper and still need to dig side tunnels for train platforms.
More roadheaders will be brought in for the multi-billion Rail Projects Victoria digs, including an extra machine at the State Library Station and three at Town Hall Station.
Construction and engineering might be male-dominated industries, but that is changing, Ms Sitch said.
"I'm the female in my construction team, where there are six engineers. But other teams in my area are almost at 50-50," she said.
"So it isn't female-dominated, but there are a lot of women in the CBD North station project."
Have you signed up to the Bendigo Advertiser's daily newsletter and breaking news emails? You can register below and make sure you are up to date with everything that's happening in central Victoria.