Prufrock is The Boring Company's remotely operated tunnel boring machine.
Prufrock is a tunnel boring machine designed and manufactured by The Boring Company for excavation of transportation, utility, and freight tunnels. The machine arrives on a transporter called The Monster, tilts down to launch, and is intended to begin a tunnel within 24 hours without an excavated launch pit or crane. It installs a precast concrete liner while continuing to mine, rather than stopping after each advance, and targets about one mile of advance per week.
Prufrock is operated under a Zero-People-In-Tunnel design from the company's Bastrop Operations Center in Texas, where the fleet is controlled remotely. A hard-rock variant, Prufrock-MB or Main Beam, is used where the surrounding rock is competent enough to act as the tunnel liner, and units of that variant were mining Nashville limestone for the Music City Loop. The company keeps one standardized tunnel and machine design across projects.
