Knowing a thing or two about building long underground tunnels, that is here in Switzerland, I nearly choked to death from laughter when seeing this machine! What they bought is used for mining - building rough, crude, and imprecise tunnels.
When you build a tunnel for trains the tunnel must be properly tug, otherwise a curve may be too sharp, or you have changes in elevation not desired, or best you have to rebore the tunnel to get the desired curve which creates too big a cavity that requires additional structural bracing to support the ceiling from caving in....
I can just see it now. Ten engineers telling the operator which direction to bore. Then when installing the track they find out they bored the tunnel too tight and can't lay the track down to make the curve, taking some blowtorches and bending the track ?properly? so that it can be layed, and then when driving the train the first time learning the train can?t turn that tight on the ?track properly adjusted.?
What blows my mind is though why they didn't spring for the badest and hottest tunnel digger machine in the world, a nuclear tunnel machine. No joke. Check out some pics and facts on
http://www.detailshere.com/tunnelmachine.htm