Long Itchington Wood Tunnel in Warwickshire has become the first deep tunnel on HS2 to complete its civil engineering phase.

The twin-bore tunnel is one mile long and will carry the high-speed railway into the West Midlands.

Its development up to this point has included completing three cross passages, concrete finishing works and base slabs, and emergency and maintenance walkways.

The HS2 project will have five twin-bore tunnels, and Long Itchingtojn Wood is the first to reach this milestone.

A total distance of 27.4 miles of HS2’s route between London and the West Midlands will be in deep, twin-bore tunnels.

HS2 began work to build the Long Itchington Wood Tunnel in June 2020. It was excavated by a boring tunnel machine that was 125 metres long.

The tunnel boring machine was named ‘Dorothy’, after Dorothy Hodgkin, the first British woman to win the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

Launched in December 2021, Dorothy had finished excavating both bores of the tunnel by March 2023.

Excavating the two tunnel drives and the entrance sections produced around 750,000 tonnes of material.

This has been reused to build embankments along the railway’s route. After the tunnel’s breakthrough, workers began fitting out the tunnels with its structural components.

HS2’s main works contractor for the West Midlands, Balfour Beatty VINCI (BBV), is building the tunnel. It is also building fifty-six miles of HS2 between Long Itchington in Warwickshire to the centre of Birmingham and on to Staffordshire.

The design of Long Itchington Wood Tunnel aims to minimise the impact of construction on the local environment.

It runs thirty metres below ground level, which has enabled the preservation of an ancient woodland above. The tunnel’s route avoids local villages.

The next step will be to fit out the inside of the tunnel with power, track and signalling equipment, and other elements of the complex systems needed to operate HS2.

Since the tunnel’s construction began, 380 people have been involved in work on the project.

“It’s a small part of HS2 but it’s been four and a half years of my life in which I’ve seen this construction go from its very embers to nearing completion – a really proud moment for me personally.

“Long Itchington Wood Tunnel is a tremendous feat of engineering and would not have been possible without a huge amount of continuous work put in over the past five years – I’d like to thank everyone involved working both onsite and behind the scenes for their support.”

Doug Barnett, Senior Project Manager for HS2 Ltd