Watch “Chessie” the Boring Machine Finish 6,300-Foot Chesapeake Tunnel (Video)
This newly finished tunnel, which runs parallel to an older tunnel, will eventually carry two lanes of southbound traffic under...
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After almost two years of mining, the tunnel boring machine “Chessie” has broken through the final portion of a 6,300-foot tunnel connecting two man-made islands of the Chesapeake Bay Bridge and Tunnel.
Chessie broke into the receiving pit January 27, marking a significant milestone in the Parallel Thimble Shoal Tunnel Project.
Watch the video of her historic breakthrough at the end of this story.
This newly finished tunnel, which runs parallel to an older tunnel built between the trestles, will carry two lanes of traffic southbound, while the original tunnel will carry two lanes of northbound traffic.
This newly finished tunnel will carry two lanes of traffic southbound.Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel
Next steps for Chesapeake Tunnel Joint Venture, the design-build contractor composed of Dragados USA and Schiavone Construction Company, include installing electrical and mechanical systems and constructing support buildings. The full project is forecast to be completed in early 2028.
The machine used to mine the tunnel was designed and built by Herrenknecht of Germany and features a 43-foot cutterhead and an overall length of 308 feet. Chessie weighs over 3,000 tons, has a maximum rotation speed of 2.3 rpm and has a maximum advance rate of 2.4 inches per minute.
Over the course of the project, Chessie – named by then 6th grader Grace Bentley of Nandua Middle School in a 2018 regional contest – removed around 500,000 cubic yards of soil.
The 17.6-mile-long Chesapeake Bay Bridge and Tunnel connects Virginia Beach to Virginia's eastern shore and was first opened to traffic in 1964. Sections of the structure include 12 miles of low-level trestle in each direction, two 1-mile tunnels beneath a shipping channel, two bridges and four manmade islands.
Total cost for the Parallel Thimble Shoal Tunnel Project comes in at $756 million, and the project received a federal Transportation Infrastructure Finance and Innovation Act loan of $338.5 million in 2016. Other funding sources include the sale of revenue bonds, a Virginia Transportation Infrastructure Bank loan and the district’s General Fund.
The new Parallel Thimble Shoal Tunnel is the first transportation tunnel construction in the Mid-Atlantic region by a tunnel boring machine.
