A year ago, Elon Musk and his Boring Company unveiled a 1.1-mile “test tunnel” under an area of Hawthorne, California, where Musk’s Space-X is headquartered. The $10 million tunnel was a proof-of-concept for both tunneling under urban areas as well as Musk’s new ideas of what constitutes a mechanical mole.

So, a “test tunnel” for what? For a series of high-speed transportation tunnels under Las Vegas, of course.

Several weeks ago, the board of directors of the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority (LVCVA) approved an initial tunnel from the Strip to the Las Vegas Convention Center (LVCC). The Strip station will be near the Drew, a resort hotel currently under construction on land previously occupied by the Algiers Hotel and El Rancho Hotel and Casino.

Use of Mechanical Moles

Mechanical moles have been in use for decades, primarily on water and sewer projects everywhere from Chicago to Mersin, Turkey. In fact, the Turks working on that tunnel—part of a hydroelectric project—called the mechanical mole kabak oymak, which, roughly translated, means “tunneling zucchini.”

More recently, much larger mechanical moles (the originals were between 12 and 15 feet in diameter) have built transportation tunnels, including the famed Channel Tunnel that runs 31 miles under the English Channel and serves as a quick way to get from London to Paris or vice versa. Incidentally, eleven tunnel-boring machines (or TBMs, as the engineers refer to mechanical moles; tunnel stiffs—the workers who do the tunneling—simply call it a mole) were used to construct the Chunnel. The moles used for the rail tunnels were 25 feet in diameter, while the service tunnel was created with 16-foot moles.

For the past few decades, mechanical moles have resembled flat-nosed bullets (if a bullet could be 15 feet in diameter, that is). The entire mole is many feet in length, but the digging part is confined to the first five or six feet. Back from the head are grippers—metal “feet” that press against the curved side of the tunnel to hold the mole in place while hydraulic thrusters slowly press the rotating head into the earth. The head of the mole is fitted with a multitude of two-hundred-pound “bits” that slowly grind away the earth and rock ahead.

The bits are positioned so that the entire vertical surface is etched away and is efficiently removed. Built into the boring head are large vents that remove the excavated dirt and deposit it on a thick conveyor belt that runs toward the back of the mole, where a line of “muck cars” await to haul it away.

Although the dirt-and-rock waste (tunnel stiffs call it muck) created by the digging has been used in the past to reclaim land from the sea (as was the case with the Chunnel’s muck), The Boring Company plans to use the dirt and rock created during the digging to make bricks and pavers. The day may come that Las Vegas residents hold barbeques on patios made from the recycled-dirt pavers from Elon Musk’s tunnels.

How Will the Las Vegas Tunnel Work?

The tunnel will serve as an underground freeway populated entirely by autonomous electric vehicles (AEVs) that can carry passengers at speeds of up to 155 miles per hour. Currently, the AEVs used in other TBC tunnels are Tesla Model X and Model 3 vehicles modified to carry up to 16 passengers, so it is likely that these will be the same vehicles used for the Las Vegas project. The LVCC project is expected to be completed by January of 2021. Use of the LVCC portion of the system will be free of charge.

Plans for Future Tunnels in Las Vegas

Musk and TBC have even bigger plans for Las Vegas, including a proposed extension of the LVCC tunnel to the Strip.

And the tunneling wouldn’t end there. Proposals already exist to build a much longer tunnel running thirty or forty feet beneath—and mirroring the route of—Las Vegas Boulevard, all the way from the Fremont Street Experience in downtown Las Vegas to the south end of the Strip and even beyond. There’s even a proposal to build a tunnel that would branch off to carry passengers to McCarran International Airport.

But for now, construction will be limited to that portion of the proposed tunnels that transects the LVCC campus. The tunnel will serve to move people from the Convention Center’s new Exhibit Hall to the existing North/Central Hall—shortening a 15-minute walk (in Las Vegas heat) to a couple of minutes’ ride in air-conditioned comfort.

According to reports, the estimated cost of the one-and-a-quarter-mile tunnel in Las Vegas is in the neighborhood of $52 million.