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    First TBM for Grand Paris Line 15 East: staging, phasing and risks for tunnel engineers

    December 4, 2025|

    Reviewed by Tom Sullivan

    First TBM for Grand Paris Line 15 East: staging, phasing and risks for tunnel engineers

    First reported on Tunnelling Journal – News

    30 Second Briefing

    Delivery of the first Herrenknecht TBM for the Grand Paris Express Line 15 East marks the start of excavation preparations for the 5km Bobigny–Marcel Dassault drive on the Bobigny–Champigny Centre section. The machine will be shipped to the Normandie Niémen shaft in Bobigny in early 2026 for progressive assembly, ahead of a southward launch in spring towards the Rosny Bois-Perrier area. Eiffage plans to use a total of four TBMs on this contract, signalling a multi-face mechanised advance strategy for the section.

    Technical Brief

    • TBM handover to Eiffage occurred on 21 November 2025 at Herrenknecht’s German factory.
    • Machine is the first of four TBMs allocated to the Bobigny–Champigny Centre contract.
    • Herrenknecht’s product range (0.10–19 m diameter) suggests scope to tailor cutterhead and shield to local geology.

    Our Take

    Herrenknecht’s track record of supplying TBMs up to 19 m diameter in our database suggests it can adapt cutterhead design and segment logistics for constrained urban sites like Rosny Bois-Perrier, which is often a bottleneck on dense metro builds.

    Among the 139 Infrastructure stories tracked, only a subset involve multi-kilometre urban tunnelling, so the 5 km drive on the Bobigny–Champigny Centre section places this Eiffage contract towards the more complex end of current underground works rather than short station or crossover excavations.

    With an early 2026 horizon for this Grand Paris Express Line 15 East segment, the schedule overlaps with several other major European metro packages in our coverage, which is likely to tighten the regional market for experienced TBM crews and maintenance specialists rather than for the TBM hardware itself.

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    Prepared by collating external sources, AI-assisted tools, and Geomechanics.io’s proprietary mining database, then reviewed for technical accuracy & edited by our geotechnical team.

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