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On Friday, the New York Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) launched a tunnel-boring machine for the first phase of the Second Avenue Subway.

The 485-ton machine, which will dig through approximately 50 feet of bedrock per day, is expected to finish boring the tunnel by November 2011, MTA officials said in a prepared statement. The project is scheduled to be completed by December 2016.

“There have been skeptics who saw construction start and stop in the 1970s and said the Second Avenue Subway would never be built,” said MTA Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Jay Walder.

Under the first phase, new stations are being built at 96th Street, 86th Street, and 72nd Street, and a station is being expanded at 63rd Street and Lexington Avenue. Future phases of the project call for extending the line from 125th Street in Harlem to Hanover Square in the Financial District. In addition, the configuration of the tracks will allow for possible future extensions into Brooklyn, Queens and the Bronx.