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Pieces of the massive machine that will bore a 5.3-kilometer tunnel under the Panama Canal for the next step of the Panama metro are on their way to Panama, government officials said this week.

The underground section for Line 3 of the metro will run between Panama Pacifico and Balboa, with an underground station. It will require a gigantic engineering effort’ one of the biggest since the construction of the Canal. In contrast, it took two boring machines a year and a half to excavate a 6.7-kilometer section of Line 1 of the metro. But this tunnel will be 66 meters deep and run underneath one of the man-made wonders of the world. 

The equipment for the boring apparatus should begin arriving in September. It will likely take three or four months to build the machine and prepare the sites, Minister of Public Works Rafael Sabonge told Panama America. The first step will be to develop an “attack pit” on the west side of the Canal, which will be the staging area for the boring machine.

If all goes to plan, the tunneling operation could begin in January 2024.

“The tunnel itself begins with the attacking pit and will be about to start once the TBM can be assembled, which is a process that takes three to four months, but the work will begin in this administration,” Sabonge told the newspaper.

The minister also updated the media on the progress of the aerial section of Line 3, which is 39% complete as of the end of June.