Skip to main content

Mexico’s longest tunnel project being excavated

Congestion is particularly bad on the road from the city centre to Juan Álvarez international airport. Jams are frequent on the section of road between Acapulco Bay and the Diamante and Puerto Marques suburbs, which currently means climbing La Escénica. To tackle the problem the city authorities decided to build the new tunnel and bypass the traffic jams. The route of the 3.2km tunnel runs under the Cumbres de Llano Largo mountain. The contract for excavating the two tunnels was awarded to the Aca-Túnel con
July 18, 2017 Read time: 3 mins
Indeco has experience in configuring its breakers for use in tunnelling
RSSTwo specially configured hydraulic breakers from Indeco are being used in the project to construct Mexico’s longest tunnel. The HP 3000 ABF units are being used at the Aca-Túnel jobsite in Acapulco to help build the new tunnel, which is intended to reduce congestion in one of Mexico’s most popular tourist destinations

Congestion is particularly bad on the road from the city centre to Juan Álvarez international airport. Jams are frequent on the section of road between Acapulco Bay and the Diamante and Puerto Marques suburbs, which currently means climbing La Escénica. To tackle the problem the city authorities decided to build the new tunnel and bypass the traffic jams. The route of the 3.2km tunnel runs under the Cumbres de Llano Largo mountain.

The contract for excavating the two tunnels was awarded to the Aca-Túnel consortium, which comprises the privately held firms 2765 ICA and CARSO, two of Mexico’s key contractors.

Maquinter, Indeco’s distributor in Mexico, sells and rents out construction machinery equipment in various different states in the country. The consortium, Aca-Túnel, sent the distributor a provisioning request for Indeco hydraulic breakers. Indeco units had recently been used successfully by ICA in Oaxaca State on a road-building project, which strongly influenced the decision to opt for breakers from the same supplier. The two HP 3000 ABFs (HP 5000s in the US), have been mounted on 178 Caterpillar 320 excavators.

“Tunnelling is a particularly tough application for hydraulic hammers, due to the special conditions they are required to work under,” explained Indeco’s marketing manager Michele Vitulano. In tunnelling jobs there is more dust around the breaker than for quarrying work, due to the enclosed nature of the operating area. To prevent the risk of extra wear, additional water damping and tool greasing technology is often used in tunnelling jobs. Working temperatures can also be higher in tunnelling as there is less airflow, so hydraulics need extra cooling. And as breakers often have to be operated horizontally or even pointing upwards in tunnelling work, further measures are needed to provide protection for the internal working components.

However, as hydraulic breakers have been used successfully in Italian tunnelling projects for many years, Indeco has plenty of experience in configuring its units for use in this type of application

For more information on companies in this article

Related Content

  • Dressta increases dozer application range
    February 6, 2015
    Dressta is increasing the application range of its well-proven bulldozer designs with the introduction of new models for specific duties. The company claims that these variants represent Dressta’s customer-focused approach to manufacturing construction equipment. The firm has considerable experience in specifying its machines for different, and in some cases particularly arduous, machine applications. The range of customer-specific variations include optimal equipment configuration to adapt the machines to
  • Smart road surfacing in a tunnel
    August 19, 2022
    Smart road construction techniques have been used in the widest tunnel in Switzerland. Efficient operation and logistics were required for paving a width of 11.5m in the Gubrist Tunnel and contractor Marti AG Solothurn Bauunternehmung made good use of Vögele’s WITOS Paving Plus technology to optimise its work on the project.
  • Indeco cuts up New York City’s old Kosciuszko Bridge
    November 23, 2017
    An Indeco ISS 45/90 is proving essential for demolishing the old Kosciuszko Bridge in New York City. New York City’s old 1.9km Kosciuszko Bridge, which crosses Newtown Creek connecting Green Point, Brooklyn with Maspeth, Queens, has been out of service since April. By the end of the year, the polygonal Warren through-truss structure will be no more. To replace the old bridge, in 2009, the New York State Department of Transportation planned the construction of two cable-stayed replacement bridges.
  • Tunnels eliminate bottlenecks
    February 10, 2012
    Some of the bottlenecks on the multi-lane Mittlere Ring, Munich, Germany, one of the main arterial roads circling the city centre have been eliminated by the addition of new tunnels. The Luise-Kiesselbach Square, the last section of this road improvement effort, is an important traffic hub south-west of the city where motorways A96 from Lindau and A5 from Garmisch meet, causing long delays in daily rush-hour traffic, writes Patrick Smith.