"Seventy metres down, in deep incognito beneath a disguised ventilation shaft in the Chilterns countryside, lies HS2's buried treasure: two 10-mile tunnels, built to avoid an area of outstanding natural beauty, eerily spectacular in gleaming concrete. They are, laments a staffer on the high-speed railway scheme, what all of the route should look like by now: pristine, fully constructed, and just waiting for a railway to run through them."
"From mothballed worksites scarring central London to abandoned routes in the Midlands and the north, plenty has not gone to plan. But this first look inside the completed 9m-diameter tunnels their ventilation shafts the final piece in the jigsaw shows what civil engineers with a clear remit can do. This, ironically, was one of the first areas of dispute and redesign of the railway's route."
Seventy metres below the Chilterns sit two completed 10-mile HS2 tunnels built to avoid an area of outstanding natural beauty and finished in gleaming concrete. Main tunnelling finished last year and the final shafts completed the construction phase. Ballooning costs and repeated delays have generated criticism about national infrastructure capability. Mothballed worksites in central London and abandoned routes in the Midlands and north contrast with the finished tunnels, which demonstrate what civil engineers with a clear remit can achieve. A construction compound peaked at about 1,800 workers and produced 112,000 tunnel segments using two German tunnelling machines.
Read at www.theguardian.com
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