Tunnelling ends on the Broadway subway, three months ahead of schedule
Crews broke through at Arbutus on Friday afternoon. Track laying begins in September, and the province is still promising trains in 2027.
The boring machine surfaced at Arbutus on Friday afternoon, three months ahead of the schedule it was handed and eleven years after this city started arguing about whether the line beneath it should exist. Both facts drew applause from the small crowd of engineers allowed to watch.
The breakthrough closes the project's riskiest chapter — five and a half kilometres of twin tunnels under one of the busiest corridors in the country, threaded past building foundations, a century of undocumented utilities, and one very documented sinkhole that made three news cycles in 2024.
What remains is the part that historically goes wrong quietly rather than dramatically: track, systems, signalling, and station fit-out, the phases where transit projects lose their schedules a month at a time without a single photogenic setback. The project office says its 2027 opening date survives the tunnel phase with margin to spare. It said so carefully.
The corridor, meanwhile, gets its street back in stages — Great Northern Way first, the cut-and-cover blocks last. For the businesses that survived four years behind hoarding, the project's community office has one more program to announce: a marketing fund, arriving, with no apparent irony, exactly when the disruption ends.
