A Look Inside Toronto's Newest Subway Tunnels
Torontoist has been acquired by Daily Hive Toronto - Your City. Now. Click here to learn more.

Torontoist

28 Comments

cityscape

A Look Inside Toronto’s Newest Subway Tunnels

A guided tour through the still-unfinished tunnels of the Spadina Subway Extension.

By , and • Photos by Corbin Smith

Often ignored during the course of the ceaseless political arguments over where and how to build new subway stops in Toronto is the fact that it’s already being done. Construction on the TTC’s Toronto-York Spadina Subway Extension is well underway. If all goes according to plan, we’ll have six more stops on the north end of the Spadina subway line by late 2016, the northernmost of which will be all the way up in Vaughan.

It’s a massive job, requiring four tunnel-boring machines and an estimated $2.6 billion in funding from three levels of government. Although there’s still plenty of work to do, the dirty part is actually almost done: the TTC was saying, as of its last progress update in June, that tunelling was about 85 per cent complete. Earlier today, we, along with reporters from other media outlets, were given a guided tour of the interiors of some of those still-unfinished underground shafts. We visited two construction sites: the future Downsview Park Station and the future Vaughan Metropolitan Centre Station.

Click through the image gallery above for a look at what we saw, and try to imagine the trains running through.

CORRECTION: September 10, 2013, 9:40 AM This post originally referred to Sheppard West Station. In fact, the construction site we visited will one day be known as Downsview Park Station. (The current Downsview Station will be renamed Sheppard West Station once construction is complete.)

Comments