ITD Begins Casting Tunnel Segments for Bangalore Metro’s Pink Line

Workers from ITD Cementation India Ltd. today began pouring concrete to cast their very first tunnel ring segment for constructing a 4.591 km underground section of Bangalore Metro’s 21.386 km Line-4 (Reach 6 / Pink Line) which will connect Nagawara – Kalena Agrahara through 18 stations.

The event commenced at 10 am at ITD Cementation’s casting yard facility in Baiyappanahalli from where a total of 4603 segments are expected to be cast to form the Pink Line’s tunnels which will have a 5.6 meter internal diameter.

ITD Cementation is responsible for building the 4.591 km Package RT-04 (Tannery Road – North Ramp) of the 73.92 km Bangalore Metro Phase 2 project which was awarded with a contract value of Rs. 1771.25 crore in November 2019 with a deadline of 42 months. Earlier this month, they commenced ground work at Venkateshpura and Tannery Road stations.

ITD’s scope of work involves building this section’s twin tunnels (total 6.34 km), roughly 360 meter ramp at Nagawara, and four stations at Tannery Road, Venkateshpura, Kadugundanahalli (formerly Arabic College) and Nagawara.

Here are some snaps. A tunnel ring is typically 1.4 m wide, and consists of 5 segments + 1 ‘key’ segment.

With this development, tunnel ring segments are now being cast for all four packages of the 13.885 km underground section of the Pink Line. Images of Larsen & Toubro’s casting yard for packages RT-02 and RT-03 can be viewed here.

Per BMRCL’s August newsletter which was published today, L&T had completed casting 683/3244 rings (21.1%) in Peenya, while Afcons Infrastructure on Package RT-01 had cast 92% of an undisclosed number of temporary rings.

As shared earlier, ITD Cementation plans to use two refurbished Herrenknecht tunnel boring machines (TBMs), currently stored in Chennai, with serial numbers S-839 and S-840. These are both mixed shield earth pressure balance machines (EPBM), which previously saw action on Delhi Metro Magenta Line’s Package CC-32, unlike the 4 slurry based TBMs Larsen & Toubro is using on packages RT-02 & RT-03.

Per the tunneling plan, they will first travel south from Venkateshpura to Tannery Road and then be brought back to Venkateshpura for tunneling northwards towards Nagawara.

For more updates, check out the Bangalore section of The Metro Rail Guy!

– TMRG