Big tunneling machines get names, and cities tend to make a small event out of it. Munich narrowed more than 1,000 public suggestions down to three finalists in July, put them up for an online vote, and about 2,300 people picked one. Donna Maria won with roughly 59 percent, ahead of Martha at 28 percent and Anna at 13 percent.<\/p>\n
The name is really a route description. Donna comes from Donnersbergerbr\u00fccke, where the machine starts. Maria comes from Marienhof, where it stops. Four people submitted that combination independently, and one of them also worked in the old line about Munich being the northernmost city in Italy, which is the sort of argument that wins a vote in Bavaria.<\/p>\n
She is 584 feet long, weighs about 1.5 million pounds and cuts a face 16 feet across. She is scheduled to start on September 17. And the tunnel she is about to spend the next stretch of her working life digging is one that no passenger will ever ride.<\/p>\n
Munich is building a second S-Bahn trunk line under its center, and the finished thing needs three bores: two passenger tubes and a gallery running between them. That middle gallery is the escape route. Before it is an escape route, it is a survey.<\/p>\n
Donna Maria gets the gallery. Railway Gazette<\/a> reports she is set to start a 1.9-mile drive on September 17 from the western portal near Donnersbergerbr\u00fccke to Marienhof. The 4.3-mile main drive, the one that eventually carries track, is not expected to begin until 2028.<\/p>\n Deutsche Bahn is fairly open about the double duty. While the project is still a construction site, that first bore reads the ground ahead of the bigger machines. Once trains are running, it becomes the protected escape and rescue route sitting between the two tubes.<\/p>\n Kai Kruschinski-W\u00fcst, the overall project director, called the first machine the project’s pathfinder. The German word he used was Pfadfinder, which is also what Germans call a Boy Scout, and for once the corporate metaphor is doing honest work.<\/p>\n Sixteen feet is not a big machine by tunneling standards. The borers that open high-speed rail tunnels run to thousands of tons and sometimes need a slab of concrete poured under them<\/a> before they can take a first push. Donna Maria is deliberately the small one, sent ahead so the geology gets written down before anything larger shows up.<\/p>\n Six machines are planned for the project in total. DB counts six tunnel drives: two traffic tunnels from the west, two from the east, and two exploratory and rescue tunnels. Railway Gazette counts three bores in the finished alignment, two single bores of four miles each plus about 2,000 feet of cut and cover at the portals. Both counts are right, because each bore gets worked from both ends.<\/p>\n That is a kinder arrangement than some. On the Italian ramp toward the world’s longest rail tunnel, the plan is to take one machine apart<\/a> and haul it backward through its own finished hole to dig the second tube.<\/p>\n The other five Munich machines will get names too. DB has not said how it will run those votes yet, which is a shame, because the July shortlist left strong material on the table. Ingebohrg, which buries the German verb for drilling inside a grandmother’s name, deserved better.<\/p>\n Munich sits on clay, silt, sand and gravel. The second trunk line runs more than 130 feet down, below the water table, and reaches as deep as 157 feet between Laim and Leuchtenbergring. In places it passes close underneath S-Bahn and U-Bahn lines that are carrying people while the digging goes on.<\/p>\n So the machine is a Mixshield<\/a>, developed by Herrenknecht together with the contractor consortium. Inside the cutterhead, excavated soil is mixed with a support fluid so the crew can hold pressure at the face to a set value. Hold that pressure and the street above stays where it is. Lose it and you get the kind of front page nobody on a tunneling job wants.<\/p>\n Behind the shield the tunnel assembles itself. Precast concrete segments weighing tons apiece are stacked into closed rings, and the machine shoves off the last ring it built to move forward. Up to eight people work on board at a time.<\/p>\n The consortium doing all of this is four German firms working as one: Wayss and Freytag Ingenieurbau, Max B\u00f6gl, Ed. Z\u00fcblin and Bauer Spezialtiefbau. Herrenknecht signed the machine off at its Schwanau works on May 21 and handed it to them, and it was promptly taken apart, trucked to the launch pit near Donnersbergerbr\u00fccke and rebuilt there.<\/p>\n Ground was broken on the second trunk line in April 2017. The first mechanized drive starts in September 2026, the first passenger tube does not get a machine until 2028, and DB’s current schedule puts the line in service somewhere between 2035 and 2037.<\/p>\n The money moved as well. DB priced the project at 7.0 billion euros using 2021 costs. Construction and material prices then rose 32.5 percent between 2021 and 2024, and the project’s own financing page<\/a> now puts the total at 9.4 billion euros at 2024 prices, roughly 11 billion dollars.<\/p>\n What the money buys is about 6.8 miles of new alignment running largely parallel to the existing east-west tunnel between Laim and Leuchtenbergring. Laim and Ostbahnhof are being rebuilt. Hauptbahnhof and Ostbahnhof get new underground platforms, and Marienhof gets an entirely new station.<\/p>\n None of this is unfamiliar territory for the operator. DB runs more than 750 railway tunnels totaling around 400 miles, one of the largest tunnel networks in Europe. Munich is just the hardest version of the job, the one where the ceiling has a city sitting on it.<\/p>\n Every section of the corridor is now active. The last eastern tunneling lot started on July 20, and work at Ostbahnhof began in October 2025. The original trunk line opened in 1972 for the Olympics and is at the limit of what it can carry, which is the entire reason any of this is happening.<\/p>\n On September 12 and 13, DB is opening the western portal site so people can walk up to the fully assembled machine before it goes in. The formal christening<\/a> comes on September 17, at the ceremony that marks the start of the drive.<\/p>\n Tunneling machines take female names by tradition, tied to Saint Barbara, the patron saint of miners. Crews treat it as more than decoration, which is why the ritual travels: the same manufacturer built the named machine sent under houses in Adelaide<\/a>, and Munich now has five more votes to run.<\/p>\n The number worth watching is not 700 metric tons. It is the 1.9 miles of ground Donna Maria reads on the way to Marienhof, because that is the data the machines cutting the passenger tubes in 2028 will be working from. If the clay under Munich behaves the way the boreholes say it should, nobody will write about her again. On this job, that is the good outcome.<\/p>\n Image Credit: DB InfraGO\/ panterra.tv<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Big tunneling machines get names, and cities tend to make a small event out of it. Munich narrowed more than … <\/p>\nSixteen feet of cutting face is small on purpose<\/h2>\n
The ground under Munich is the actual opponent<\/h2>\n
Nine years in, the first machine is only now going underground<\/h2>\n
You can go stand next to her first<\/h2>\n