Qualla: High Speed 2

High Speed 2: Introduction

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Cnbrb, CC BY-SA 2.0. Somewhere under the Chiltern Hills, the longest railway tunnel in the United Kingdom is being completed. It is 9.8 miles long, twin-bored, with two tunnel-boring machines named Florence and Cecilia that started in summer 2021 and finished their drives in 2024. Above them, on the surface, are beech woods and chalk grassland that the trains will never disturb because the trains will be moving at 360 kilometres per hour fifty metres below. Florence and Cecilia weighed two thousand tonnes each. They moved fifteen metres per day. The dirt they extracted is being spread back onto the land they passed under, soil heaped over green cut-and-cover sections so that the route disappears into farmland once the work is done. High Speed 2 is the most expensive infrastructure project in British history. It will, when it opens sometime in the 2030s, connect London Euston to Birmingham Curzon Street in around forty-five minutes. Whether it will ever go further than that is, as of 2026, no longer planned.

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Image: Cnbrb | CC BY-SA 2.0

High Speed 2: The Plan, the Reality

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Cnbrb, CC BY-SA 3.0. When HS2 was announced by the Brown government in 2009, the plan was a Y-shaped network. The western arm would run from London through Birmingham to Manchester, with a connection to the West Coast Main Line for Glasgow. The eastern arm would run from London through Birmingham to ...

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Image: Cnbrb | CC BY-SA 3.0

High Speed 2: Under the Chilterns

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit I Like The british Rail Class 483, CC BY-SA 4.0. Britain doesn't have much room for new infrastructure, which is one reason high-speed rail came so late here. The HS2 route from London Euston runs north-west into a twin tunnel through inner London, surfaces at Old Oak Common station in West London, then dives into an eight-mile...

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Image: I Like The british Rail Class 483 | CC BY-SA 4.0

High Speed 2: Old Oak Common

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Robin Stott, CC BY-SA 2.0. The most consequential station on HS2 is one most travellers have not yet heard of. Old Oak Common, in a former rail freight site in west London north of Wormwood Scrubs, will be a massive interchange where HS2 meets the Elizabeth line, the Great Western Main Line, and the Heathr...

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Image: Robin Stott | CC BY-SA 2.0

High Speed 2: What HS2 Is Really For

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Hemmers, CC BY-SA 4.0. The strongest case for HS2 was never speed. London to Birmingham is already an hour and twenty minutes by existing Pendolino train. The case was capacity. The West Coast Main Line, which connects London with Birmingham, Manchester, Liverpool and Glasgow, is the busiest mixed-traf...

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Image: Hemmers | CC BY-SA 4.0

High Speed 2: Florence, Cecilia, and What Comes Next

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit 42 Walkers, CC BY 4.0. The tunnel-boring machines are named after women - it's a railway tradition going back to the British engineers who dug the Channel Tunnel and named one of their machines after Adelaide. Florence was named for Florence Nightingale; Cecilia for Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin, the astron...

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Image: 42 Walkers | CC BY 4.0