Instruct: Given a question, retrieve relevant documents that answer the question.
Query: When did construction begin on the Metro Tunnel in Melbourne?
In February 2015, the State government established the Melbourne Metro Rail Authority, with $40 million in funding, to oversee planning of the project and $1.5 billion to commence land and property acquisitions and detailed route investigation, and a further $3 billion in funding was committed. Most of the project would be built as a public-private partnership, with private sector investors funding much of the estimated $9 billion to $11 billion cost upfront.[2] Early enabling works commenced in late 2016. In late 2017, sections of the Melbourne central business district, including City Square and parts of Swanston Street, were closed to enable construction of the tunnel and stations. The project was originally expected to be completed in 2026,[3] but has now been revised to late 2025.[4]
The northeastern end of the line, including Sokolniki, was built using the cut and cover method. The tunnels from Krasnoselskaya to Sokolniki were under construction as early as the summer of 1933, but work did not begin on the station itself until March 1934. The concrete shell of the station was completed in just five months, and Sokolniki opened along with the rest of the line on 15 May 1935. The first test run of the Metro took place in 1934 between Sokolniki and Komsomolskaya stations.
In March 1989, the first buses were tested in the tunnel; University Street station was only 75 percent complete, and buses had to drive under scaffolding and construction equipment while passing through the station. Tunnel construction was completed in June 1990, and a soft opening for University Street station was held on August 9, 1990. Bus service in the Downtown Seattle Transit Tunnel began on September 15, 1990, with several Metro bus routes moved into the tunnel from surface streets. All service on routes using the tunnel was operated by dual-mode buses, which operated as diesel buses outside the tunnel and electrically, as trolleybuses, when inside the tunnel. During its early months, University Street and other stations were affected by serious water leaks, which splashed water onto walkways during the tunnel's first winter in operation. The leaks were later fixed by Metro contractors.
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.
The Metro Tunnel is a pair of rail tunnels between South Kensington in Melbourne's inner north-west and South Yarra in the city's inner south-east. Currently under construction, the tunnels will connect the Sunbury line to the Cranbourne and Pakenham lines through the Melbourne CBD. The project includes five new stations – North Melbourne, Parkville, State Library, Town Hall and Anzac – and will increase the capacity of the inner Melbourne network by releasing train paths in the existing City Loop underground railway. The tunnel is expected to be structurally complete by 2024 and to open in 2025.
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.
By 2015, with planning work for the first Metro Tunnel underway, the "Herald Sun" began referring to the second tunnel as "Metro 2", as the state government confirmed that the new Parkville station would be designed with provision for future expansion to an interchange. At the same time, the newspaper reported that the state government of premier Daniel Andrews was broadly supportive of the need for a second major rail project at the completion of the Metro Tunnel.
The construction of the line began on December 17, 1977. On this day, the first piles were driven into the base of the station Leninskaya. A commemorative sign was erected on the site of the construction (letter M in the tunnel). In September 1978 tunneling began from the station Leninskaya. July 13, 1984 in the pit of the station Moskovskaya collapsed walls. Two workers from the student brigade, who helped with the construction of the metro, died. There is a legend that the ghosts of dead students are still walking through tunnels and metro stations.
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 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 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.
Construction of the Green Line south from L'Enfant Plaza began in July 1984 when WMATA issued a call for bids to tunnel under the Anacostia River. The firm of Harrison Western/Franki-Denys (a joint venture) was awarded the $25.6 million contract, with construction to begin in December 1984. WMATA delayed awarding the contract after American anti-apartheid activists alleged that a Belgian company with a minority financial interest in Franki-Denys did business with the racist white-led government of South Africa, but after the links were discovered to be extremely minor the contract was awarded.
In Melbourne, the Melbourne Metro tunnel currently under construction from South Kensington to South Yarra will feature platform screen doors on the new stations. New trains are currently being designed that will link with the full height doors and the new line is due to open in 2026.
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 
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.
Though proposals for a rapid transit tunnel under 3rd Avenue were introduced in the 1910s and 1920s, planning for the modern bus and rail Metro Bus Tunnel only began in 1974. The King County Metro Council approved the bus tunnel proposal in November 1983, but construction did not begin until March 1987. The tunnel between Convention Place and Westlake stations was built using the cut-and-cover method, closing Pine Street for 19 months and disrupting nearby retail businesses. The segment from Westlake to the International District was bored with two tunnel-boring machines, heading north from Union Station and finishing within a month of each other. Tests of normal buses and the Breda dual-mode buses built specifically for tunnel routes began in March 1989; tunnel construction was declared complete in June 1990, at a cost of $469 million. Light rail tracks were installed in anticipation of future rapid transit service through the tunnel, which was later found to be poorly insulated and unusable for Link light rail. Soft openings and public previews of the five tunnel stations were held from August 1989 to September 1990, with regular bus service beginning on September 15, carrying 28,000 daily passengers in its first year of operation. For the next several years, until June 2004, service in the tunnel was provided exclusively by dual-mode buses, which ran as trolleybuses in the tunnellike the city's extensive trolleybus systemand as diesel buses on surface streets and freeways.
The history of metro in Turin begins in 1930s, when the first project of an underground railway was put forward. However, only a part of the first underground tunnel was built, and the actual project was put aside. Nowadays, the tunnel is part of an underground parking system.
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.
In April, further concerns about the tunnel's impact on buildings near its route emerged, with managers of the Victorian Comprehensive Cancer Centre in Parkville and the Manchester Unity Building in the CBD, along with the University of Melbourne, making submissions to the MMRA suggesting their properties were at serious risk of damage from construction and operation vibration. The authority responded that it would work with stakeholders to minimise impacts and ensure the project did not produce and adverse impacts.[96][97] In the same month, the state government announced an upgrade of South Yarra station separate from the Metro Tunnel, in order to address the concerns about its lack of connectivity to the project.[98]
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. 
Metro officials considered shifting construction funds from the southern Green Line to the northern Green Line in order to start construction on that end of the line, but the D.C. City Council opposed this shift. Metro held the court-ordered hearings in June 1982, at which Prince George's residents argued that they had voted for Metro's 1968 bond issue based on the original Green Line route. Metro promised attendees at the hearing that agency staff would study the Green Line route and issue a report recommending a route, after which construction on the Anacostia River tunnel would begin. The site of the tunnel thus became an issue, with some residents arguing for a tunnel from the Navy Yard under Anacostia Park to Martin Luther King, Jr. Avenue SE, while others wanted the tunnel to take a more northerly route alongside the 11th Street Bridges to Good Hope Road SE. In October 1982, Metro estimated that opening of the Green Line to Anacostia would happen in the "late 1980s", and in November a Metro staff report recommended construction of the Rosecroft Raceway route.
While head of the Moscow city organization, Khrushchev superintended construction of the Moscow Metro, a highly expensive undertaking, with Kaganovich in overall charge. Faced with an already-announced opening date of 7 November 1934, Khrushchev took considerable risks in the construction and spent much of his time down in the tunnels. When the inevitable accidents did occur, they were depicted as heroic sacrifices in a great cause. The Metro did not open until 1 May 1935, but Khrushchev received the Order of Lenin for his role in its construction. Later that year, he was selected as First Secretary of the Moscow Regional Committee which was responsible for Moscow "oblast", a province with a population of 11 million.
The Melbourne City Loop was constructed as four separate tunnels between North Melbourne and Flinders Street station, roughly following the alignment of Spring Street and Latrobe Street with underground stations at Parliament, Melbourne Central and Flagstaff. the tunnels and stations were constructed between 1971 and 1985.
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.