Each weighs about one million kilograms, as much as 333 elephants. Each stretches 150 metres long, five blue whales from tip to tail.
Meet Elsie and Phyllis, the massive, cylindrical tunnel-boring machines excavating the pair of eastbound and westbound tunnels for the Broadway Subway, an extension of Metro Vancouver’s SkyTrain network.
The duo has just completed a journey they began in fall 2022. Their arrivals at each station have occasionally been dramatic, their rows of teeth cracking through the rubble.
On April 26, Elsie’s rotating cutterhead broke into the Arbutus Station, the western terminus of the subway’s current phase, joining Phyllis, which had arrived a month earlier.


Elsie is named after Elsie MacGill, born in Vancouver, who was the first woman in the world to earn an aeronautical engineering degree and the first woman in Canada to receive a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering. She was known as the Queen of the Hurricanes for her work on the fighter aircraft of the same name during the Second World War, even celebrated in a comic book.
Phyllis is named after Canadian nurse Phyllis Munday. She founded the first Girl Guides troop in B.C. and was a mountaineer known for exploring and documenting the Coast Mountains and Mount Waddington.


Concrete strikes and extra precautions delayed the project’s initial late-2025 completion.
The Broadway Subway — with a price tag of $2.83 billion funded by the province, the federal government and the City of Vancouver — is intended to open in early 2026.
The rapid transit line is being built to ease the traffic of the well-ridden 99 B-Line bus, which services the busy corridor of offices and medical services on and around Broadway, Vancouver’s largest employment centre outside of its downtown.
The first phase of the subway terminates at the Arbutus Station, with plans for another phase to extend the line to the University of British Columbia, though funding is yet to be confirmed.
In the meantime, Elsie and Phyllis are being taken away to be dismantled.
Read more: Transportation, Urban Planning
Tyee Commenting Guidelines
Comments that violate guidelines risk being deleted, and violations may result in a temporary or permanent user ban. Maintain the spirit of good conversation to stay in the discussion and be patient with moderators. Comments are reviewed regularly but not in real time.
Do:
Do not: