ITC was formed in 1971 by a civil engineer as consultant for the construction industry, alos supplying and designing equipment for tunnel construction. During the first 10 years, we mainly equipped large job sites world wide with the 'custom built' rolling stock required. Our expertise was to analyse the problem of the customers, deifne the specification to suit their requirements and to locate a manufacturer to supply the equipment.

In the late seventies we were looking for a machine to clean the invert in a tunnel according to the specification of the French Authority, the so-called 'coffee spoon method'. We approached a German company called Schaeff whose expertise was manufacturing special equipment for civil construction.

We contract from them a hydraulic crawler excavator. This machine did not have a turntable, we added a built-in conveyor instead. A few months later when we commissioned the machine we realised that it was not suitable for the rough underground working conditions, because it was designed as earth moving equipment. We went through the machine item by item, and made it suitable specifically for invert cleaning. We then adapted the boom construction, the crawler carrier and the main chassis with a stronger conveyor and contracted the second machine.

The prototype was successfully tested in the French Alps during the winter of 1980. It turned out that, with only few amendments, the machine was also ideal for mucking.Within a few years, due to its flexibility, the machine became the preferred mucking and scaling machine for small and medium size tunnels in the european Alps.

The speed with which the machine could scale in poor geological conditions removed any doubts about the capability of performing excavation work. Since then due to the continuous development of appropriate boom equipment and various tools, the machine gained a maximum flexibility and diversity of use. We will come back later to our latest development: the so-called hammer Tunnel Heading Machine.

The main application areas: Tunnels for roadways, highways, subways and railway, tunnel for hydroelectric power schemes, tunnels for sewers and occasionally development tunnel for mining. We have been involved in many major projects like the Channel tunnel Railway (second stage Invert cleaning), the Swiss apls transit tunnels (Sedrun access shaft), Subways in Paris, London, Frankfurt, Stuttgart, Madrid, Rome, Seoul, etc..., High speed train in GErmany and Spain, we were engaged five years in several key Chinese railway tunnel projects and recently in the longest Chinese railways single track tunnel, the Quin Lin Tunnel - more than 18 km long on the Xian to Ankang line.

The first pipe was completed last year. The second pipe which started with started with a TBM two years ago was completed by Drill & Blast early this month, see our recent reference. Recently, the Chinese record of conventional tunnel heading in sigle lane railway tunnels was broken on several accosions thanks to the performance of our equipment.

Our company's policy for this success is based simply on three statements:

1. Good performence / price ratio.
2. High quality for highest availability. Recently, we visited a site in South America (Development tunnel in a copper mine, where a machine, more than 10 years old over 25'000hours on the clock is still operating continuously.
3. Tailor-made efficient after-sale-service. Schaeff provides a very quick service for spare parts. More than 90% are available from stock and can be shipped around the world within a few hours.

After 15 years co-operation with Schaeff compagny, we entered into a partnership agreement in order for us both to expand our activities and equipment range. Schaeff is a (for Europe) medium sized compagny, manufacturing wheel and crawler loaders, back hoes, excavators and various specialist equipment for civil construction and the world leading Fuchs scrap handling machine. All together they produce more than 3'000 units a year. Recently, Webster, the British manufacturer of road headers for coal mines also joined the Group.

The tunnelling equipment is built in the department called 'Construction, Mining and Technology'. THe Schaeff group comprises 10 subsidiaires and has half a dozen manufacturing facilities in Europe employing approximately 1'500 highly qualified people.

Since 1980, more than 200 units were successfully employed in more than 450 tunnel job sites on the 5 continents.

Carlo M. Bretz