With protesters camped nearby, two giant £170m machines are being assembled. In a decades time, passengers on the new high-speed trains hurtling out of London will get just a burst of daylight and a glimpse of the Colne Valley landscape before disappearing back underground through the Chiltern Hills. Today, in that three-mile stretch between future tunnel openings to the north-west of the capital, the £98bn HS2 projects scale, engineering might and cost are all evident: both at the vast work site scooped out beside the M25 in Buckinghamshire, and in nearby waters and woods where protesters are still encamped to stop machines coming through.
(Permalink) Chilterm Hills.TBM HS2 Tunnel Boring Machine