Digging a tunnel is tough work. Digging a 26-mile, 20-foot wide train tunnel under one of the oldest and most complicated cities in Europe? That's really tricky.
Underground London is filled with sewers, utility tunnels, building foundations and more, not to mention a massive Underground network. London's Crossrail, the company behind a new line for the Tube, used eight custom-built tunneling machines, each weighing 1,000 tons and 500-feet long.
With all the boring complete, the final tunneling machine, nicknamed Victoria for the queen who oversaw the rail revolution in Britain, is being disassembled so her parts can be recycled and reused. See, this dirt destroying master is too big to actually pull out of the tunnel, so Crossrail engineers have to chop her into bits and take her out piece by piece.
As you can imagine, taking apart something this big isn't easy---and it looks like something straight out of Mordor. Some cities choose to forgo this step entirely: A few years back, New York left a 200-ton boring machine 14 stories below Manhattan because it was cheaper than trying to disassemble and sell it.
