Fast Tunnelling

aka: Fast Tunneling

The bald kid could've used that hat. How unlucky of him.

Dig dig a tunnel
When you're done, you dig a bigger tunnel
Dig a tunnel, dig dig a tunnel
Quick before the hyena come!
Dig!

— The Lion King 1 ½

When tunnels need to be dug in fiction (particularly by the Tunnel King), they're usually dug very quickly. Ridiculously quickly. At rates that are flatly not possible, often in the range of several metres per second, without use of explosives or specialized boring machines. By way of reference, the fastest boring machine in history can only manage 4.5 metres per hour, with an experienced crew to run it, and to run all of the support systems, like removing waste rock and lining the tunnel behind the machine, which are very often ignored in fictional tunnelling.

When you get down to thinking about it, there is a lot of Artistic License – Physics involved when this happens in fiction. See, dirt's natural state is not to form a stable roof above. Like water, it seeks the lowest point. Gravity Is a Harsh Mistress here, as a tunnel ceiling that looks stable may collapse at any old time, hence why real tunnels built by humans typically have extensive support structures to hold the ceiling up, if not replace it with an artificial one outright. True, rabbits, insects and other burrowing creatures make these nice, neat little tunnels, but those are much smaller creatures than humans and they have evolved to dig quickly and safely.^note At least we think so. We have no idea how many rabbits die in natural cave-ins, and will likely never know. And then there's the fact that the soil and/or stone that the tunnel displaces has to go somewhere. Having the creature eat their way through the earth doesn't help either, since the digestive system will only hold as much material as will fit inside it.

Note that this trope only applies to characters digging far faster than their abilities and equipment should allow. Rock-shapers, earthbenders, Superman and similar characters do not generally fall under this trope. Expect a Wormsign to show up near the surface.

Compare Dishing Out Dirt and Tunnel King. May be possible with a Drill Tank. See also Dig Attack when this is used offensively.

---

Examples:

Anime & Manga

• One episode of Cat's Eye involved the girls, who are not expert miners by any means, drifting a tunnel a good fifty metres long in just a few hours. Granted, they're using proper machinery, and going through relatively soft rock, but that only brings it down to "ridiculously fast" rather than "ludicrously." To give credit where it's due, waste rock disposal and the shoring up of the tunnel are given consideration.
• In Digimon Tamers, after defeating Vikaralamon, the Tamers' partners disappear from the scene through different methods. Taomon teleports, Rapidmon Flash Steps, and MegaloGrowmon/WarGrowlmon digs into the underground in less than four seconds.
• Doraemon has a gadget called the Mole Gloves, which allows the wearer to dig tunnels and travel underground within seconds. It appears mostly in the shorts, though said gadget was used in one movie, Doraemon: Nobita in the Wan-Nyan Spacetime Odyssey, when Nobita and their new friend Hachi gets trapped underground by a cave-in and Doraemon have to dig them out.
• In Fullmetal Alchemist, it took years and years for Sloth to dig the transmutation circle that surrounds Amestris, but the rocks he digs up still seem to be going to nowhere.
• JoJo's Bizarre Adventure:
  • Golden Wind: Secco's Oasis lets him turn solid ground into mud at will to weaponize and travel through it.
  • JoJolion: Doremifasolati Do can break the ground and push through soil allowing him to perform quick tunneling underground.
• This is a ninja trick used a few times in Naruto. Naruto used it in his fight with Neji to deliver the finishing blow, and Kakashi's ninja dogs used it earlier during the second fight with Zabuza to attack and immobilize him, somehow using there sense of smell to see while underground.
• Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann:
  • Diggers like Simon use hand powered drills to bore through rock and soil at very high speed.
  • Lagann can be launched as a fastball, drill through lots of rock without losing speed, come back out, and destroy two robots.
• One of the Majestic 12 from Zatch Bell! has rapid digging as his super power, but he can't see where he is going while underground and so hurts himself by running into things.

Comic Books

• In ElfQuest, both humans and trolls dig hard rock at close to normal walking pace.
• The Mole, one of Mandrake the Magician's recurring villains, regularly wore a suit with a head-mounted wide heat beam capable of burning through anything. It also had a jetpack. That's right, the beam burned away rock and earth with no residue fast enough that he could fly along the tunnel as it was being made. He used it to rob banks.

Fan Works

• Hellhounds in the Fallout: Equestria universe are known for their razor-sharp claws, ability to use modern weaponry, and their ability to dig. The last one is a vital part of some of their combat tactics.
• In Red Lightning Burrowing Owl has this as one of his two powers, and he uses this the most commonly.

Films — Animation

• In An American Tail, two of the Cossack cats start going after Fievel at the beginning, and they (and Fievel) rapidly dig under the snow while they're at it. The cats even emit a steam locomotive whistle sound as they do this.
• Atlantis: The Lost Empire: Moliere's digging machine has these characteristics. SHE LIIIVES!!!
• Played for Laughs in the film of Fantastic Mr. Fox.
• A villain with a digging machine shows up briefly at the very end of The Incredibles.
• Madagascar: On the island, Alex tunnels under the sand to get out from under a large crate containing Melman.
• In The Rescuers, the mole digs underground as fast as the Devil's Bayou animals charge in the climax when they all rally to go save Penny from Medusa.
• Offscreen in one scene of Zootopia, Judy manages a Flash Step to the far side of a fence while Nick is climbing it. A hole next to her and a second on the other side of the fence suggests that she tunneled.

Films — Live-Action

• The Core features a giant tunneling drill train thing to quickly tunnel to the center of the Earth. These are called subterrenes in Real Life.
• Deep Core uses combinations of drills and Frickin' Laser Beams to quickly go through rock. The test of the prototype subterrene (intended by the military as yet another method of nuclear delivery) results in the massive shift of the tectonic plate.
• The Great Escape at least shows a bit of the logistics: Where do you put the dirt you dig out from the ground, how do you make sure the tunnel won't collapse, and where do you get the materials to stabilize it? Especially if you're watched by nazi soldiers.
• Zigzagged in Short Circuit 2; the bad guys' plan involves tunneling under the bank vault a set of valuable jewels are being held before they're taken to a museum for display. It's implied they had started the tunnel quite a while before our heroes unwittingly shack up in the building above their operation, and with their presence interrupting their digging, they'll never be able to make it to the vault in time. Once they trick Number 5 into doing their job for them, he blazes the rest of the trail to the vault in a few hours.
• In Starship Troopers, the Bugs' ability to do this is a minor plot point.
• Parodied in Top Secret! when Nick returns to the lab to free the professor, who is behind a tarp dropping a small spoonful of dirt into a small pile.
  Professor: But had almost finished my tunnel!
  Nick peers behind the tarp to find a modern road tunnel complete with paving, concrete wall and electric lighting.
  Nick [surprised]: Nice work.
• The Graboids in the Tremors franchise travel underground at incredible speed using this method, pushing themselves along with the spines covering their bodies and ramming earth aside with bulletproof heads. In more localized projects, they are also able to bury a car, eat the foundation from under a house, and dig a pit trap for an earthmover in relatively short order. A nod to realism is given in that though they can move easily through sand and soil, any kind of stone remains a barrier. One kills itself by attempting to ram through the concrete wall of a drainage gully.

Literature

• Averted in Animorphs when they use mole forms to dig a tunnel to the yeerk pool. In the two hour limit they barely get 6 feet dug, and at the angle of decent means they only got 1 foot below ground. Not only that but they miss the intended destination and end up in a bat cave that just happened to border the Yeerk Pool. it is played straight in a later novel, where Ax and Tobias use Taxxon morphs to eat a massive tunnel to the Yeerk Pool.
• Dwarves in Artemis Fowl eat their way through the ground, and do so at very high speeds - faster than they can run. The vanishing dirt part is averted too.
• A source of drama in Fantastic Mr. Fox, where the fox family must dig for their lives to escape Boggis and Bunce and Bean's mechanical shovels.
  Now there began a desperate race, the machines against the foxes.
• In Men at Arms, Lance-Constables Cuddy and Detritus are trapped in sewers that were deep underground when they were first built, and are now even deeper underground after a thousand years of Ankh-Morpork turning last century's street level into cellars. Cuddy is able to dig a tunnel to the surface wide enough for a troll, in probably a matter of hours, using his own breastplate as a shovel. It's a dwarf thing.
• In Oath Of Fealty, the Todos Santos crew dig under the LA jail to extract a colleague, all in a single night. Justified in that they're using the very latest in mining technology, a boring machine that melts the rock in front of it and cools it as it passes to leave a perfect and pre-lined tunnel behind (something like an advanced version of the subterrene in the Real Life section). It's also specifically stated to be "the world's slowest getaway vehicle", but "slow" here means "compared to, say, a police car"; a few miles per hour is damn fast for a tunneling machine, and they can more or less leave it behind and recover it later:. They know the LA police will know who's responsible, but since they have properly reported the machine as stolen to their own internal police department, they also know the LA police won't be able to actually prove it.
• A couple of The Pendragon Adventure books include Drill Tanks called dygos which can dig nearly as fast as they can drive. In the territory they show up in, there's a whole civilization Beneath the Earth that was dug with these things.
• Averted in The Wizardry Quested, part of the Wiz Biz series by Rick Cook, when a band of dwarves considers entering a castle by tunnelling into the cellars, but decide against it because they don't have the needed three years.

Live-Action TV

• Unseen but implied to have happened in Hogan's Heroes, where Hogan's men have dug so many tunnels that one is surprised the camp doesn't fall in. The new tunnels they dig are depicted as very narrow and small, and with several men working for hours they don't manage to go very far. It's only later on that each tunnel winds up resembling a second story. It's a little unnerving that the entire camp is just a sinkhole waiting to happen.
• Used to get to the center of the Earth in Saul of the Mole Men.
• Star Trek: The Original Series: The Horta ("Devil in the Dark") has a very strong acid that it uses to dissolve rock to form tunnels-problem is that this process is depicted as being virtually instantaneous, and there is virtually no detritus left over other than a few wafting vapors.

Tabletop Games

• Before there was Champions Online, Champions had the Tunneling power and characters for whom this was their primary movement ability.
• Any creature with a burrow speed in Dungeons & Dragons. Typical burrow speeds are half the burrower's normal movement speed. The most common burrow speed is 15 feet per round, or 1.7 miles per hour. The king of this trope is the Purple Worm, a Sand Worm that can dig a tunnel 10 feet in diameter through solid rock at the same speed as a human runs.
• GURPS has the Tunneling advantage. Even the weakest version lets you burrow at a rate of one yard per second - a brisk walking speed - and every additional 5 character points you spend when buying the advantage increases this speed by a further yard/second.
• In the old Palladium System, it's possible to have a character that can tunnel faster than they can walk!
• Warhammer 40,000: Tyranid Trygons and Mawlocs are massive digging creatures that are able to dig tunnels by using bio-electrical fields to fuse the earth to the sides of the tunnels.

Video Games

• In Bugs Bunny: Lost in Time, Bugs can perform tunneling to pass through obstacles whenever a rabbit hole is nearby.
• Command & Conquer: Tiberian Sun: Nod Subterranean APCs and Devil's Tongues can travel pretty swiftly underground.
• Crypt Of The Necrodancer has mole enemies who dig as fast as your character can move and only get out of their hole to attack them. The boss Fortissimole has the same power coupled with damage on the eight surrounding squares when he gets out.
• Dusty Revenge and it's prequel, Dusty Raging Fist have andromorphic moles who, thanks to having drills for arms, can tunnel underground and re-emerge to attack you from below, a trick they'll repeatedly use if left idle.
• Dwarf Fortress has this trope, although the time dilation might make it more plausible. Also, they're dwarves.
  • It's also mentioned in the story Summoned to Darkness. A single dwarf dug an amazing escape tunnel in a few weeks with no tools.
  • Dwarf Fortress is not as egregious as it seems. You still have to figure out how to manage all the leftover stone, though soil is still fair game.
  • Legendary miners are probably the epitome of this trope. They literally dig out tunnels through earth as fast as they walk, and only slightly slower in actual solid rock.
• Enlisted, an FPS published by Gaijin (the same guys who made War Thunder), allows the players to quickly dig tunnels by simply shoveling the ground. Each scoop will magically erase a whole chunk of solid dirt off the ground, though you can't dig too deep and can only dig a trench-level hole. This allows for such hilarious tactics as digging a trench from your spawn right to the enemy point, or simply digging a big hole in the ground and camouflaging it with sandbags to make enemy tanks fall into it.
• The Legend of Spyro: Dawn of the Dragon: Grublins can dive into the earth, zip about underground and reemerge elsewhere with the same swiftness and agility of a fish diving, swimming and breaching through water.
• The Legend of Zelda:
  • The Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap: Link can use the Mole Mitts to dig through dirt for fast tunneling.
  • The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild and The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom: If you get out of their range or if their shrubbery disguises are destroyed and you don't kill them, Forest Octoroks will chase you down by burrowing through the ground faster than Link can run, without leaving any visible trail or furrow. Snow Octoroks do this before every shot.
• Lemmings: Digger, Basher and Miner Lemmings make pretty darn good progress relative to their size in a short period of time, and they won't stop digging until they reach the other side of whatever obstacle they tackle.
• Pokémon:
  • In Pokémon Diamond and Pearl and Platinum, there is a Ruin Maniac that challenges you to collect a certain rare Pokémon (Unown) before he finishes digging a tunnel, aptly called "Maniac Tunnel". The more versions of Unown you collect, the longer the tunnel becomes. Closer to the end of your collection (i.e. after obtaining 26 out of 28 Unown), the man has singlehandedly dug the tunnel hundreds of feet long — even if you only take a few hours to collect the required variants of the Unown — with the tunnel itself leading to the two variants of Unown needed to finish one's collection. The townspeople outside lampshade this by talking about how crazy the guy is.
  • In any of the games, you can use the Dig skill to near-instantly tunnel out of a cave, no matter how far you'd have to travel to do so. Of course, you can also instantly exit any cave or building with an "escape rope," which makes about as much sense.
  • Dugtrio, a mole-like Pokémon that only travels by tunnelling (no one knows what its bottom half looks like because it never comes out of the ground), has one of the highest base speed stats. It's faster than most flying-types and on par with Alakazam, who mainly gets around by teleporting.
• Sonic the Hedgehog: Knuckles the Echidna has this ability. The Yellow Drill Wisps in Sonic Colors also utilize this as a means to get to secret rooms and pathways. The tunnels made are filled back up just as fast, though.
• Minecraft:
  • Players can easily dig a fifty meter long tunnel in a matter of minutes. Faster, if they can get themselves a diamond tool. (And as of 1.16, slightly faster than that if they can upgrade that diamond tool with a netherite ingot). And carrying 2240 cubic metres of cobbled/solid rock around with them doesn't slow the process down at all.
  • As of 1.0, tools can be enchanted to improve various aspects including the speed at which they break blocks. With the best efficiency enchantment, a diamond pick will break stone-based blocks INSTANTLY.
  • 1.4.2 introduced a Beacon, which can give you the Haste effect. With an Efficiency V Diamond or Netherite Pickaxe^note Gold Pickaxes are technically faster, but so much weaker you're probably not gonna use them. with the Haste II effect, you can dig out your own quarry in minutes.
• Super Mario Bros.:
  • Super Mario Bros. 2: Mario and his friends have to dig through sand in order to reach the bottom of a pyramid's underground chamber in two levels (2-1 and 2-3), the bottom of a regular cavern in another (2-2), and the bottom of a sand-filled vase in yet another (6-1). Toad is the fastest at digging, so these levels are best played as him.
  • Super Mario World: Normally, hitting a yellow block from below only makes it rotate before returning to normal, so the only way to break it is by performing a spin jump onto it while having a powerup active. One of the Star World levels consists of a very deep cave filled with blocks of this kind, so it's necessary to drill through them by using this method until reaching the bottom leading to the normal exit (though the level's middle point hides a secret exit alongside a key that opens it). The tunneling is very fast with the Mushroom and the Fire Flower, and slower with the Cape Feather.
  • Super Paper Mario: Welderberg can drill a pipe between Flipside and Flopside in a few seconds after being paid.
  • Super Mario Galaxy 2: Mario and Luigi can dig extremely quickly through whole planets in seconds when using the Drill powerup. Doing this is necessary to reach (and then hurt) the weak point of a boss in Spin Dig Galaxy.
  • Super Mario Maker 2: The game grants this ability with the SMB2 Mushroom (added in a post-release update), as it can be used to dig through Solid Clouds.
  • Mario Party:
    • Mario Party: The minigame Buried Treasure revolves around digging underground until a hidden treasure chest with coins is found. The coins are granted to the first character who reveals (and subsequently opens) the chest.
    • Mario Party DS: There's a minigame called Mole Thrill where the characters have to dig a tunnel quickly to avoid being caught by a Monty Mole (it looks big, but it has a regular size; the characters fleeing from it were shrunk by Bowser at the start of the game).
  • Mario & Luigi: Bowser's Inside Story: Bowser has to dig an extremely long tunnel simply by shoving a Drill Tank as part of the main quest, in probably hours at most.
• In Donkey Kong Country Returns, this is true of the level where DK and Diddy are chasing the Drill Tank driven by various enemy moles. Indeed, the tank/train is drilling fast enough to be faster than the ROCKET DK and co are riding on at the time (to the point the player has to steer the rocket barrel through the tunnels the thing is carving out while they're still being carved).
• Both played straight and subverted in NetHack. If you find an uncursed pickaxe or a dwarfish mattock you become an expert digger just by wielding it, but the act of digging out a square burns much more time than walking through an existing corridor. (And eventually you have to eat.) The Wand of Digging, on the other hand, blasts through a line of squares instantaneously. You can also polymorph into a Xorn which, like the Dungeons & Dragons original, can walk right through dungeon walls.
• Zerg units in Starcraft and its sequel can burrow, making them invisible. This is a valid strategy to take the heat off your front line units during combat, forcing the enemy to switch targets to healthy units instead. They can burrow into dirt, rock, asphalt with the same ease and even in bridges...somehow. In the second game this even works with the ultralisk, a mutated elephant so big it looms over tanks and tramples force walls but is nevertheless capable of burrowing completely underground in less time than it takes a missile to travel to it. Roaches and Infestors fit this trope perfectly, as they can actually tunnel underground.
• Tunnellers in Stronghold can undermine enemy walls in a matter of minutes, provided they get some protection from archers - they're rather squishy otherwise.
• In Warcraft III, Crypt Fiends can burrow down fast enough to escape someone trying to kill them. They can still be killed by aiming siege weaponry at the ground though, so apparently they don't go that far.
• Imps and Dwarves in Dungeon Keeper dig out tunnels big enough for a dragon to walk down at an incredible rate, especially once the imps get Super-Speed.
• The Mass Effect universe contains enormous Sand Worms called Thresher Maws who are able to tunnel faster than ground vehicles can move. They also only cause tremors and Wormsigns when they dig, rather than the massive ground collapses you'd think. In Mass Effect 3, a particularly enormous one is also able to drag other massive (as in 200 metres tall!) objects underground with it, again without explaining where all the soil disappears to as it digs.
• Star Wars Expanded Universe: One of the games has Sand Worms that move ridiculously quickly and with little disturbance of the surrounding sand.
• Shadow of the Colossus has a Sand Worm as a boss that can keep up with a galloping horse.
• Many monsters in Monster Hunter will dig underground in order to move through/between areas at speeds ranging from extremely fast to borderline teleportation. Most notable are the Diablos/Monoblos and Agnaktor, because they usually try to come up from underneath you...
• In Shovel Knight, Mole Knight shows incredibly fast digging skills as he jumps into the walls surrounding his boss arena. In Dig, the titular Shovel Knight can do this too in every diggable area, but it's nothing compared to Drill Knight's excavating machines.
• Spelunky allows a player with a mattock to instantly remove dirt or rock in their path. Bombs clear a large section very quickly as well. This is often the easiest and safest way to make your way through any given stage.
• Clonks always carry a shovel, and can dig out entire caverns to build in very quickly.
• Deep Rock Galactic: Pickaxe digging is a little slow, but still significantly faster than real life would dictate. The Driller's twin drills, however, will take him through solid rock almost as fast as he can walk, leaving a perfectly safe tunnel his teammates can follow. And the Drop Pods that take you to and from the mission areas can carve through miles of earth in minutes, though tunnel stability is less of a problem when they can just drill back out.
• Shantae and the Seven Sirens: Shantae can dig her way through soft ground with the Gastro Drill transformation. She can dig through it as fast as she can walk, and can move even faster with the Dirt Crawler card equipped.

Web Animation

• Shiromori from Mystery Skulls Animated burrows through the ground to get from place to place while following Mystery's trail.
• DSBT InsaniT: Martha's Monster form, which is a giant blue snake that can dig fast. Screech can do this by creating a giant drill in front of himself.
• Dreamscape: CHEN kinda has to have this ability, since he lives in the center of the planet.

Web Comics

• In Erfworld, an average Dirtamancer can tunnel as fast as he can walk. Without actually being IN the tunnel◊.

Web Original

• According to Le Donjon de Naheulbeuk, it takes 48 dwarfs to dig in two days a 28-meter tunnel in granite. Of those, about only six to eight dwarfs actually dig, the rest are medical staff, beer brewers, guards to prevent the others from getting at the beer.
• Shows up with the character Boris from Trinton Chronicles who's main mode of transport is super-fast digging. It helps his power also restores the ground to pristine shape including repairing pipes, reconstructing cement floors, and undoing damage his huge claws create every time he burrows.
• Averted in ShiftyLook's Mappy webtoon when Mappy and Dig Dug are stuck in the desert and Mappy suggests that Dig Dug digs back to town to get help.
  Dig Dug: I am not a cartoon rabbit; digging is hard work. I gotta push this drill through solid rock, and it's not faster than walking. In fact, I'm pretty sure digging is slower than walking!

Western Animation

• Looney Tunes and related media:
  • Bugs Bunny typically digs at about the same pace other characters walk or run, leaving a raised trail to mark his passage as he zips about underground.
  • Daffy Duck does as well in some shorts where he follows Bugs.
  • The Tasmanian Devil does this on occasion, drilling through not just earth but also trees and even rocks.
  • Animaniacs: "Draculee Draculaa" has the Warner siblings traveling this way. When they emerge from the ground, Yakko tells the audience:
    Yakko: I know we're not rabbits, but it's a Warner Bros. tradition.
• Popeye:
  • "Insect To Injury": A variant. When digging a moat around his house, Popeye digs at a tremendously fast pace, removing large chunks of earth that effectively vanish as he raises his shovel and completing a full moat within a couple seconds.
  • "Popeye the Sailor Meets Sindbad the Sailor": After one of Sinbad's punches knocks him inside a tree, Popeye somehow moves down from this tree and into the ground, rapidly moves underground while visible from the surface as a moving bump, and comes back up through another tree.
• Steven Universe: The Chrysocolla can quickly move through the ground and create tunnels that go to different parts of Amethyst's room.
• SWAT Kats had a digging machine that gets underground in seconds.
• The Simpsons:
  • "Radio Bart": This happens when Bart falls down a well and the townspeople dig a parallel hole to get at him.
  • "Homer the Vigilante": At the end, all of the townspeople dig a hole looking for buried treasure, but find an empty trunk. Not at all discouraged by this, they continue digging well into the night until they find themselves at the bottom of a very deep pit.
    Otto: How do we get out?
    Homer: We'll dig our way out!
    Chief Wiggum: No, no, dig up, stupid!
• Totally Spies!: The Spies are very good at this. Their handheld and footworn gadgets can not only dig very quickly without a sweat, but also eliminate all the excess dirt or rock into thin air, even if the path is to go straight up, leaving the Spies clean and tidy.
• Avatar: The Last Airbender: In "The Drill", the eponymous instrument goes through the roughly twenty-metre-thick compressed granite wall of Ba Sing Se in perhaps two hours.
• The Owl House: Terra Snapdragon's plants can rapidly envelop her, burrow underground, and blossom at a new location, even underwater, effortlessly. It makes it ridiculously easy for Terra to catch someone off-guard as she can surface without a sound, unless she's riding in one of her more massive plants.
• Shows up on Jimmy Two-Shoes, where Jimmy and Beezy tunnel into both Heloise's and Lucius' homes in a matter of seconds.
• Kim Possible invertes this with the eponymous protagonist, who briefly has Superman-type powers in one episode. She can drill through dirt and rock by spinning at a high speed, but unlike Superman, or even a Tasmanian Devil, she looks visibly nauseous from the effort.
• The Tick encountered this when the Mole Men came to visit the surface world so the Mole King could find a girlfriend (he does, in the Christie Brinkley Expy Mindy Moleford, who is one-quarter Mole Man, apparently).
• Gopher, complete with a Wormsign, in The New Adventures of Winnie the Pooh. Amusingly, when the viewpoint goes underground we find that he's not only traveled, but also set up very large mining tunnels braced with timber in that time.
• Brandy of Brandy & Mr. Whiskers once did this to escape prison. Mr. Whiskers happened to be walking past the area that her tunnel led to, mistook it for a sink hole, and put a large heavy rock over it to keep people from falling in.
  Brandy: Sorry, carefully manicured nails, but sometimes it pays to be a dog!
• Ruel from Wakfu can dig incredibly quickly when he has the right motivation. He also has a fast-moving Drill Tank.
• My Little Pony:
  • My Little Pony 'n Friends: Zig-zagged with the stonebacks. Sometimes, they swiftly push their way through the earth, quickly creating large holes with nothing more than a lightly raised rim to show for the displaced dirt. Sometimes, as when the heroes are trying to get past Ahgg in "The End of Flutter Valley", they dig at a much more realistic slow pace.
  • My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic: In "To Change a Changeling", while the Maulwurf spends most of its on-screen time above ground, it digs away extremely quickly once it decides to flee at the end of episode. At the very least, it digs fast enough to take its entire elephant-sized bulk underground in a second or two, while leaving nothing more than slightly raised edges around the resulting hole in the way of detritus or displaced soil.
• Veggietales: Larry-Boy and the Rumor Weed has Archibald modify the Larrymobile to be able to switch from flying to boring without slowing down. Larry understandably thinks that Achie has gone insane and he is going to die when the Larrymobile loses its wings and starts plummeting towards the ground. It isn't explained whey they didn't just skip the flying part and go straight to boring, though it may have been because it would give him more momentum.

Real Life

• Subterrenes could theoretically drill tunnels and eliminate waste rock AND reinforce the resulting tunnels fast enough to act as Real Life Drill Tanks. However, only the Russians have ever built a "Battle Mole", as the primary component was a nuclear reactor. Which broke down and killed the crew. Conspiracy theories abound, however.

---