January 2016 was supposed to signify a new beginning for “Bertha,” the world’s largest tunnel-boring machine that now sits under downtown Seattle with its 57.5-ft-dia cutterhead motionless.
Big developments and big setbacks marked transportation construction in 2015, a year in which two journalists traveled across America in a rusty 1949 Hudson to see how infrastructure projects are getting done.
Maybe the restart of the world’s largest tunnel-boring machine will come as a Christmas present to the folks in Seattle, as the scheduled boring by “Bertha,” the 57.5-ft-dia machine currently sitting idle under downtown