Instruct: Given a question, retrieve passages that can help answer the question.
Query: How long is the Melbourne Metro Tunnel going to be?
The Metro Tunnel (sometimes also known as the Melbourne Metro Rail Project or the Metro Rail Capacity Project) is a metropolitan rail infrastructure project currently under construction[1] in Melbourne, Australia. It includes the construction of twin 9-kilometre rail tunnels between South Kensington station (north west of the Melbourne City Centre) and South Yarra (in the south east) with five new underground stations. The southern portal for the tunnel is to be located to the south of South Yarra station. As a result, the tunnel will connect the Pakenham and Cranbourne lines with the Sunbury line, and allow these lines to bypass Flinders Street station and the City Loop while still stopping in the Melbourne central business district.
The tunnel has two tubes. The western tube is 28,407 m long and the eastern tube 28,418 m long, and it is the longest tunnel in Spain (when not counting the Line 12 tunnel in the Madrid Metro). The tunnel was opened for traffic in December 2007. The tunnel is used by the AVE high-speed trains.
Royal Park railway station is the main railway station in Parkville, located in Royal Park to the north adjacent the zoo and is on the Upfield railway line, serviced by Metro Trains Melbourne. The planned Melbourne Metro Rail Project tunnel will have an underground Parkville railway station.
A leaked long-term plan produced by Transport for Victoria also included the tunnel, and suggested that the western section should be built first, followed by the originally proposed eastern section.
North Melbourne station is to be located near the intersection of Arden and Laurens Streets in North Melbourne. It is planned to allow for urban renewal of the formerly industrial suburb, and is expected to serve some 25,000 residents once complete. The existing North Melbourne station will be renamed West Melbourne.
Since its entrance is located on a hillside, two separate escalator tunnels had to be created, connected by an underground station vestibule. The upper tunnel is long, while the lower tunnel is long. The vestibule was built in the same way as with other stations of the Kiev Metro system; it was first completed at ground level, and then lowered to its final location underground. The vestibule is a tall monolithic dome with an approximately similar diameter.
As part of the Melbourne Metro Rail Tunnel it is expected that the turnback facilities at Essendon Station will be upgraded to allow services to start at Essendon when the tunnel opens in 2025 
On 29 November 2017, the state government announced that, as part of the Melbourne Metro Tunnel project, North Melbourne would be renamed West Melbourne, to better reflect its geographical location, and to allow a nearby new station to be named North Melbourne.
Following a series of announcements of major rail projects prior to the state budget in May, the Melbourne Metro Rail Authority was renamed Rail Projects Victoria (RPV) to reflect its involvement in projects outside the Metro Tunnel.[99]
In February the following year, the state government announced that it was considering alternative alignments for the tunnel, because of concerns that cut and cover construction in Swanston Street in the central city would result in massive disruption to traffic and retail activity for an extended period of time.[27] Then, at the launch of its 2014 budget in May, the Napthine government announced that the Metro Tunnel project would be abandoned and replaced with an alternative proposal called "Melbourne Rail Link". The MRL route consisted of a tunnel from South Yarra to Southern Cross via Kings Domain and Fishermans Bend, where it would join existing City Loop tunnels reconfigured for bidirectional traffic. Furthermore, the government promised that the realignment would enable a Melbourne Airport rail link to be constructed from Southern Cross at the same time.[28] Ultimately, the reconfiguration of the rail network was to have produced similar operational outcomes as the Melbourne Metro plan, with a Sunbury-Dandenong corridor operating directly between Southern Cross and Flinders Street in both directions, but with an additional end-to-end line from Frankston to Ringwood via the new tracks.[29]
East West Metro Tunnel is an under construction underwater river tunnel of Kolkata Metro in Kolkata, West Bengal. The river tunnel is construct underneath Hooghly river. Tunnel length is and width is . A 520m stretch of the tracks will go through a tunnel under the Hooghly. The roof of the tunnel would be about 30 metres from the ground level. The tunnel will be completed in 2018. The tunnel will be "first underwater river tunnel in India " and South Asia . The tunnel used by East West Metro Line for metro rail service and constructed by Kolkata Metro Rail Corporation.
By November, with the state election approaching, the rail tunnel had become a major point of contention in the campaign, with the government apparently prioritising the East West Link (EWL) road tunnel, and the Labor opposition promising that "under no circumstances" would it build the EWL if elected.[34] As an alternative, Labor proposed reinstating the original Metro Tunnel plan, which retained the support of senior public servants in the Department of Transport, Planning and Local Infrastructure. According to this analysis, the original tunnel route performed substantially better than the EWL in a cost-benefits analysis, but no such calculation had been performed for the new Melbourne Rail Link.[35]
The Common Tunnel (), sometimes called the Common Line (), is a long tunnel of the Oslo Metro which runs through the city center of Oslo, Norway. The name derives from the fact that all six lines of the metro use the tunnel, which runs from Majorstuen to Tøyen. The section has six stations, including the four busiest on the metro.
After the Andrews government announced an expanded West Gate Tunnel project in 2017, in an attempt to improve transport links from the western suburbs, public transport advocates cited MM2 as a more sustainable alternative to the massive road tunnel. The MM2 project again received attention in December of that year, when the University of Melbourne announced plans to build a new campus for its Melbourne School of Engineering at Fishermans Bend. Although the state government suggested an extension of the tram network could be built to serve the facility, treasurer Tim Pallas admitted that a heavy rail line through the area was unlikely to proceed in the near future. At the same time, however, he mentioned that a "Metro 3" project was also possible, but did not provide any detail on the plan.
Two additional realignments occurred at the north end of the Green Line, but with less acrimony. North of Fort Totten, the line was to have surfaced in the median of the planned North Central Freeway, I-95, and proceeded to a point just west of Prince George's Plaza, with an intermediate station at Chillum. I-95 and Metro would have run through the Northwest Branch Stream Valley Park, however the cancellation of I-95 through the District and out to the Beltway in 1974 meant that it was no longer necessary or appropriate to condemn an I-95-sized swath of parkland just for Metro. WMATA eventually selected a new route that skirted most of the park, and it was federally approved by the mid-1980s. The planned Chillum station was relocated and named West Hyattsville. The other alignment dispute occurred in the Petworth section of Washington, and involved whether the tunnel would go under or skirt Rock Creek Cemetery and how to go through its soft-soil burial ground (i), and the least disruptive way under New Hampshire Avenue from Georgia Avenue–Petworth to Columbia Heights. The tunnels eventually skirted the cemetery using the New Austrian Tunnelling method and stacked under New Hampshire Avenue.
Melbourne Metro 2 (MM2) is a proposed extension to the Melbourne rail network, consisting of a tunnel from Newport to Clifton Hill via the city centre. Conceived as a follow-up project to the under-construction Metro Tunnel, MM2 would link the Werribee and Mernda suburban rail lines and include stations in the Fishermans Bend development precinct, at Southern Cross and at Parkville, allowing passengers to connect with Metro Tunnel and City Loop lines. Although MM2 has been proposed and refined by a number of government-led and independent reports and proposals, no funding or policy commitment to its planning or construction is in place .
The scope of work for the new contract includes the design and civil works for a 3.1 km long metro twin tunnel and two underground metro stations. Within the construction period of 36 month the tunnel will be built by Shield TBM whereas the stations will be constructed using the cut + cover method.
Among the projects envisaged for Stage 3 – the five-year period after the completion of the Metro Tunnel – was the creation of another end-to-end line with a tunnel from Clifton Hill to Southern Cross. The NDPMR suggested that the tunnel would provide the additional capacity needed to serve the booming patronage on the South Morang, as well as providing additional space in the existing Clifton Hill tunnel of the City Loop so that a new line to Doncaster could be accommodated alongside Mernda line services. The NDPMR also recommended that the tunnel be extended in Stage 4 from Southern Cross to a new station at Fishermans Bend, with a view to further expansion to Newport and the Werribee line.
In February 2015, the Andrews government announced $40 million in immediate funding to establish the Melbourne Metro Rail Authority, in order to commence detailed planning work along the original route, and promised a further $300 million in its upcoming budget. It also revealed that a $3 billion line of credit established to fund the EWL would be redirected to the Melbourne Metro project. A timeline was provided, with construction expected to commence in 2018 and the tunnel to be open in 2026. Meanwhile, however, the federal government continued to refuse to fund the project, which led some observers to describe Andrews' commitment as a significant political risk.[39][40]
The High Capacity Metro Trains are a fleet of electric multiple unit (EMU) trains on order for use by Metro Trains Melbourne on the Melbourne rail network. They are due to enter service in mid-2019 and will eventually become the primary rollingstock used in the Metro Rail Tunnel when it opens in 2025. The HCMTs will carry around 1400 passengers in 7 carriages, running on Melbourne's 1500 V DC overhead catenary system, and will be the most advanced trains in the Metro Trains fleet when they are introduced. A consortium of investors and rail companies is constructing the trains in China and Australia via a contract with the Victorian Government, in addition to upgrade works necessary for the operation of the trains.
The station is located so close to the Gallery Place station (which connects to the Yellow and Green Lines) that the lights of each station are visible to the other through the tunnel. Plans have long been in the works to add a pedestrian tunnel to connect Gallery Place–Chinatown with Metro Center and provide pedestrian access to all six Metro lines. The most recent major development was the completion of a "Gallery Place/Chinatown - Metro Center Pedestrian Passageway Tunnel Study" in July 2005.
The first Metro Tunnel proposal gradually emerged in detail after the 2008 Eddington Report, which identified a new rail tunnel creating an end-to-end line from west to east through the city centre as a major priority for transport investment in Melbourne. In the period between 2008, when the tunnel was first envisaged, and 2016, when construction began, the Metro Tunnel underwent several changes to its scope and proposed delivery, including the combination of what was originally envisaged as a two-stage project into a single-stage construction. 
Parkville railway station is a planned station to be built as part of the Melbourne Metro Rail Project. It will be built below Grattan Street between Leicester and Elizabeth Streets. The station will be built using the cut-and-cover method. Construction is scheduled to commence in 2018. It is due to open in 2026, serving the large health and education precinct in the area. It is set to be an interchange between the Melbourne Metro Rail Tunnel and the proposed Melbourne Metro Rail Tunnel 2, and provisions have been left in the design of the station to allow for this.
Final designs and concept images for the new stations were released in May 2018, using materials and features intended to reflect the character of the five station precincts. CYP, RPV and Minister for Public Transport Jacinta Allan expressed their hope that the designs would be accepted and integrated into the Melbourne landscape as new cultural icons following their completion.[100][101] Then, in June, the state government released modelling demonstrating the project's contribution to improved accessbility in the CBD, with travel time savings from virtually all parts of Greater Melbourne to the Parkville and St Kilda Road areas served by the Metro Tunnel.[102]
In February 2015, the State Government established the Melbourne Metro Rail Authority to oversee planning for new twin 9-kilometre rail tunnels through the central city between South Kensington station and South Yarra. The new Metro Tunnel will have five new underground stations and connect the Pakenham and Cranbourne lines with the Sunbury line, creating a new route through the CBD as an alternative to the City Loop. New underground stations will be created at Arden, Parkville, Domain and two new CBD stations, State Library and Town Hall. Enabling works were underway by 2016 and major construction work on the tunnel and stations began in 2017.The project has an estimated cost of $11 billion and is scheduled to be complete by 2025.