HS2 Tunnel Finished, Outside Still Pending

The tunnel under Wendover is done. Not the railway, not the trains, not the part where anybody gets anywhere, but the tunnel itself, a mile of superb, weatherproof, fully structural dark, finished ahead of the thing it was dug for and now sitting quietly in the Chilterns like a sentence waiting for a verb.

Engineers describe the outer structure as complete, which is a careful way of saying the hole has an outside now. The outside is the achievement. For some years the hole had only an inside, which is an easier thing to produce and a much harder thing to put on a sign.

Haddenham has taken an interest, because Haddenham takes an interest in anything that happens within twelve miles and involves a crane. Three men from the village drove over to look at it on Sunday, parked on a verge, looked at a sealed concrete lip in the side of a hill for eleven minutes, and drove home again saying it was bigger than they expected, which is what men say about everything.

What the village has not been told is when the trains arrive, and the honest answer appears to be that the trains are a later department.

The parish council was briefed and emerged broadly supportive of the darkness. One member noted that Haddenham has no tunnel of any kind, has never had one, and that the nearest thing the village owns is the bit under the railway bridge where the water collects and a certain sort of driver finds out about his exhaust. There was a feeling in the room that this was now a gap.

It is worth saying plainly that nobody in Buckinghamshire asked for a mile of underground anything, and that a county which cannot reliably get a bus to Aylesbury on a Thursday has instead been given the finest unused corridor in southern England, sealed at both ends, lit by nothing, heading confidently towards a timetable that has not been written. There is something almost tender about it. We have built the afterlife of a railway before we built the railway.

The Herald intends to keep watching, mainly because we have nothing else on, and because somewhere under a hill near Wendover there is now a mile of perfect silence that will one day be ruined by a train.