HS2 breaks into Old Oak Common, linking tunnels to West Ruislip

HS2 has connected its Old Oak Common station in west London to the tunnels running north, after mining teams broke through into the station box. The link completes a continuous 8.8-mile (14.2 km) tunnel between Old Oak Common and the West Ruislip portal, HS2 Ltd said on 4 November.

The announcement came in a statement from HS2 Ltd issued as the rail minister, Lord Hendy, visited the site. The northbound tunnel broke through on 13 October. Work on the two connecting tunnels, each 360 metres long, began in May 2024 from the Victoria Road crossover box site.

These last sections were not bored. According to HS2, they were mined through London clay with tunnel excavators and lined with 30,000 cubic metres of sprayed concrete. About 100,000 tonnes of spoil came out, all of it sent to reuse projects elsewhere in the UK. The London blog ianVisits explains why a boring machine did not finish the job: the final few hundred yards form a cavern for crossover tracks rather than a standard running tunnel, and they were given a second, cast-in-place concrete lining using travelling formwork.

The breakthrough itself used a method new to HS2. Rather than demolishing the wall between the finished tunnel and the station box in one go, crews cut it into blocks and pushed them back into the completed tunnel. "This is a major milestone for HS2, bringing us a step closer to delivering a world-class transport hub at Old Oak Common," Lord Hendy said in the statement.

The wider programme figures are more telling than the single breakthrough. HS2 says all deep-bore tunnelling between London and Birmingham is now finished, that more than 80% of the major structures are under construction or complete, and that it delivered over 10% more construction than planned in 2025/26. The company still aims to run trains between Old Oak Common and Birmingham Curzon Street by 2037 or earlier, covering about 140 miles in roughly 45 minutes.

For operations, the crossover is the practical gain. While Old Oak Common is the route's London end, a set of points just outside the station lets trains switch between the two running lines, giving the timetable some room to recover when a platform or track is blocked. Passengers will change there for the Elizabeth line, Great Western Railway and Heathrow Express, which is why HS2 calls it a "super hub".

Euston is the open question. Two boring machines launched from the eastern end of the Old Oak Common box at the start of 2026 and still have a 4.5-mile drive ahead of them, to reach a point just outside Euston by mid-2027. That is about half the length of the tunnel just completed, and the statement gives no cost update and no date for trains into central London. Mark Wild, HS2 chief executive, said the programme was in "the final stages of a fundamental reset", as quoted by ianVisits. Our report on the UK government's rail infrastructure investment plan sets out the funding context.

The next tunnelling milestone is the arrival of those two machines near Euston, expected around the middle of 2027.

Sources: HS2 Ltd media centre, 4 November 2026; ianVisits, 4 November 2026; World Construction Network, 5 November 2026.

Photo: the HS2 station box at Old Oak Common under construction, 8 November 2023 — Matt Brown, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0.

Article written with the help of artificial intelligence from the sources cited, reviewed by the TrainsNews editorial team before publication.