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Report - - Metro under construction, Urals, Russia, january 2010 | European and International Sites | 28DaysLater.co.uk

Report - Metro under construction, Urals, Russia, january 2010

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M

mistspark

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I love metro building (metrostroi we called it) to a fault.
Two things with it. At first it is changing, after a year of intensively constructing it could be fully unrecognizable if compared with initial tubes. The another good feature about metrostroi – some day it will for sure become a metro, but that is another story
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So id like to tell you about metro construction works in Urals largest city Eburg in the beginning of 2010.
Today they successfully finished this 5 year building and the new line appeared in all city maps. But in those days of 2010 all works were in full swing. Аnd their metrostroi was damn special. In resent years I was lucky enough to explore plenty of metro-constructing sites in different cities, but that Eburg site was one of the best.
Many rumors I have heard about that place. But if you want something done right, do it yourself. One day I set on train, left for Eburg and met a local comrade who was interested in tubes too.
Couple is the best for infiltration: excellent mobility and coherence, good stealth. Single person is even more stealthy but if you’re in trouble nobody can help you.
After some planning and visual exploration one extremely cold night (-30, the close Siberia breath affect) we found ourselves near the fence of the construction site. Damn dogs were out of the game because of such a cold weather, so there was no need of feeding them up.
We simply threw our rucksacks over the fence into the deep otheride snow. Then I carefully climbed on my comrades shoulders, moved to the top, pressed the barbed wire by my foot and pulled my mate up. We jumped down and hid ourselves beneath building rubbish and snow hills. The trip had started.

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That was the first future station of this metro branch. Botanicheskaia it was named, as you can see it is low station of open pit building type, nothing interesting. From this place tunnels run deeper and deeper, to -50 -60 meters near deep station Chkalovskaia. We slowly and gently passed through the frame of the vestibule towards the portals.
The videocam was looking straight at the right tube entrance, but there was a good opportunity to crawl towards the left one in dead zone of vision.
The portal of the left tunnel was blocked by the sheet metal with gates in it.
Simple electro-mechanical alarm contactor at the other side of the gates was successfully patched. We`re in, yeah.
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The inner temperature was about +5, so we pulled off some clothing. Because of the hard solid rock conditions and timeplan shortage they had to use both shield and mine-style tunnel building with drilling holes and blasting. After the blast, rock fragmentation and hauling with crawler underground harvesters and transport, special rail ring erector compresses the ring segments into the tunnel circle, injects the concrete under lining and bolts the segments together.

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This yellow thing is a tunnel boring shield, its rear part with conveyor, german Wirth. The shield was on diagnostics in disassembling camera after the left tunnel digging from Chkalovskaia to Botanicheskaia. So its rotating disk cutter was removed. You can see the hydraulic jacks of its thrust system. Its not so bright as Piter and Moscow Lovats or Herrenknechts with laser pointing and thermal spots monitoring, but rather serious device. There was a little room near that shield camera, inside it we found sleeping worker, of course we escaped quickly to the stage tunnel.
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Inside the tubing ring erector.

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The tubing segments in this metrostroy are from cast iron.

Another interesting feature - the gauge railway locos were powered by rechargeable battery, not wires. I used to watch out for the electric catenary in such places, which is always under voltage (about 480 V, not so dangerous as the third rail but rather hard, proved) but here all passes for my dumb head was free.
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Charging

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The future ventcamera

And so we came towards the main dish. I don’t know how to call exactly this type of stations in English, in Russian we have professional definition ‘odnosvod'- something like a single-vault. This type of stations is most technical hard for building, pretty much harder then colon or pilon type. The main idea is to construct deep large area without any supporting columns. In common case after the digging of the wide left and right tunnels they simply dig the third one – station tunnel and join them with passes – so we have colon/pilon station. In this case after digging the left and right stage tunnels they start the so-called calotte slot at the top.
Then the giant machine, the calotte shield which rests and moves on both sides of the future station, on rails of the right and left tunnel simultaneously, starts mounting iron arches of the vault. Then they install and compress the concrete segments, fix it with sprayed concrete. The next task is to remove the rock from the station volume. They use ledge ore fragmentation and hauling when all works are organized on three vertical ledges.

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The lower ledge, calotte shield from the supporting left tunnel.

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The cutter mine harvester of Kopeisk plant on the middle ledge of the odnosvod, the calotte shield on the background.

The depth is approximately – 60 meters.
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This is not mine but my comrade shot from the top ledge – good to show you the scale. And this is only the half of the station hall.

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The slop tunnel output for moving staircases from the surface

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From the inside

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Under the very station we discovered another tunnel technical system for water drainage purposes.

After the station complex both stage tubes were a little bit abandoned, without active construction works, without light and damn flooded. But we strongly decided to see Bajovskaia station. We had started our journey knee deep in water, for 1.5 km, without shooting but swearing loudly. To entertain and warm ourselves we had to sing songs of popular Moscow digger crew, like ‘Damn, being caught in metro’ and ‘He didn’t return from the trip’ and drank some Vodka.

At the end we entered the station. In general it was in initial phase of construction.
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An old soviet manual shield\block erector KM-15 ‘Tiger’. It was used to rearrange stage tubs into wider station tubs.
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Here we have right station tunnel of the future Bajovskaia, it is apparently wider than stage tunnel. See those arch lines on right tubing side – this would be the passes towards nonexistent central station tunnel which would form station platform. All in all they launched this metro branch without building this station, it will be finished in 2012 I suppose.

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Just to see the difference between the diameters of stage and station tunnels.

The gate with operational metro was close. Another ventilation shaft which was used as transport way down. I remained in tunnel to take some shots and my comrade stepped into the mine yard of the shaft. One moment I turned out to have a glance at the mine yard. And stood froznen in terror.
Cause I had noticed two things that was closely connects with each other. First was a grey door with the inscription ‘explosives storage’. And one small white capsule – it was the second and the worse thing. Even without close looking I new what was written on its label – OPD-5L COC-95. It was microwave sensor with doppler effect – quite common stuff in Moscow and Piter, but here in Urals…Although they kept some ammonal or something here. Good damn technological progress. It meant that someone on the surface already knew our position, quantity and even average speed. And my friend walked here and there without any concern!
Suddenly motors howled loudly!
PIZDETS, elevator cage moved down!!
We were running as fast as wind. The flooded area was crossed in 10 minutes despite the water spray. Further and further towards the exit without slowdown. At the same time we threw away all the tools, hid the fleshcards from foto and drank all remaining Vodka – the probability of being met by the policemen outside was considerable.
Thank to Urban Gods, that time we have managed to escape successfully. Have you ever felt your totally wet feet on -30? Fucking amazing.

This report has turned to be overloaded with text and fotos, but its hard to describe this stuff in other way, some things wasn’t included because of this oversize.
It seems to be my most detailed report ever)
Thanks for attention!
 
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