Downtown Toronto just got its first new stretch of subway tunnel in 60 years

The new 15.6-kilometre Ontario Line has made impressive progress, with stations, bridges, and complex engineering operations setting the stage for a generational transit connection.

Tunnelling for the line's underground section through downtown Toronto kicked off back in April with the launch of the project's first two tunnel boring machines (TBMs), dubbed Libby and Corkie for the Liberty Village and Corktown neighbourhoods they will link via roughly six kilometres of twin tunnels beneath some of the city's busiest corridors.

There hasn't been much news on the round-the-clock tunnelling process since the pair of TBMs were launched from a shaft in Liberty Village, but a new update on construction progress at Exhibition Station shared by Metrolinx on Friday offers the first real glimpse at the tunnelling progress to date.

Though tracks have not yet been installed in this new section of tunnel extending from the future Exhibition Station, it is already looking very much like a subway tunnel.

The photo also sheds a bit of light on how the tunnelling process moves along smoothly, showing systems like a partially enclosed conveyor system mounted on the side of the tunnel, which carries excavated material from the tunnel head back to a "muck pit" where trucks will load up the soil, dirt, and rock and cart it off-site.

It may look like any other transit tunnel built in recent decades, but this early section of concrete-lined tubes marks the first section of subway tunnel constructed in downtown Toronto for 60 years.

Not since the 1966 opening of the Bloor-Danforth line has a subway route serving downtown been built, and this long-overdue expansion of transit access in the city's core can't come soon enough.

The Ontario Line TBMs are carving a path that will reach depths of up to 40 metres below street level at their lowest points, advancing at roughly 17 to 20 metres per day.

Based on that rate, the TBMs should reach their extraction shaft at the Don Yard in Corktown in late 2028 or early 2029.

The actual opening date of the line itself remains elusive, with the province giving a vague "early 2030s" timeline and an ever-ballooning price tag that now soars to $34 billion.