Afcons – Sam JV Records Agra Metro’s Final Tunnel Breakthrough

Afcons Infrastructure – Sam India Consortium last Tuesday celebrated tunnel boring machine (TBM) 324’s final breakthrough at Mankameshwar Mandir Station for Agra Metro Phase 1 project‘s 14.25 km Line-1 (Sikandra – Taj East Gate).

Nicknamed TBM Ganga, this was 324’s fifth tunnel breakthrough and overall the 18th and final breakthrough for Agra Metro’s 7.93 km underground Package AGCC-02 connecting RBS Ramp – Taj Mahal Ramp.

TBM 324 is a Ø6.52m Robbins Earth Pressure Balance machine and was the project’s 2nd of four TBMs to be commissioned in mid-April 2023.

Its prior assignments involved building a 334m tunnel from Ramleela Maidan to Agra Fort (breakthrough in June 2023), a 175m tunnel from Agra Fort Station to Shahjahan Gardens Midshaft (breakthrough in September 2023), a 1175m tunnel from Shahjahan Gardens Midshaft to Taj Mahal Station (breakthrough in December 2023), and a 525m tunnel from Agra College Station to SN Medical College Station. (breakthrough in August 2024)

Its most recent assignment involved building a roughly 1.3 km tunnel with 929 rings from SN Medical College Station to the operational Mankameshwar Station’s North TBM Retrieval Shaft near Jama Masjid.

Uttar Pradesh Metro Rail Corporation (UPMRC) had awarded Afcons – Sam India Consortium with underground Package AGCC-02’s Rs. 1819.79 crore civil construction contract in March 2022 with a 48 month deadline.

Their section from chainage 3630.000 to 11564.485 consists of twin tunnels connecting 7 stations at Taj Mahal, Agra Fort, Mankameshwar (Jama Masjid), SN Medical College, Agra College, Raja Ki Mandi and RBS College.

Robbins TBM 215 (TBM Yamuna) working on the parallel tunnel had arrived at Mankameshwar Station on May 27.

TBM 324 was co-incidentally also the final machine to complete tunneling works with 8 breakthroughs for Agra Metro’s Priority Corridor connecting Jama Masjid (Mankameshwar Mandir) – Taj East Gate in December 2023.

With this development, all 18 tunnel breakthroughs for the Phase 1 project have been recorded by 4 machines – Robbins TBM 215 (Yamuna), Robbins TBM 324 (Yamuna), Herrenknecht TBM S-718C (Shivaji) and Terratec TBM S115. Tunneling works had started in February 2023.

I haven’t heard of UPMRC publicly announcing a timeline for operationalizing the rest of the line (Mankameshwar – Sikandra). Last time in the run up to the 2024 Lok Sabha elections, they took just 3 months from the final breakthrough to operationalize the Priority Corridor. This time, I imagine we’re easily a year out this time given the quantum of pending systems and civil work on the underground portion and elevated portion (AGCC-05) by Ranjit Buildcon – view recent pictures here on X by UPMRC.

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– TMRG