With its workforce now peaking at around 30,000, the U.K.'s London-Birmingham 140-mile HS2 high speed railroad is shifting into the fit-out stage with more than $6 billion of track and system work being readied for procurement.
One team in England recently achieved one of the world's most sustained single tunnel-boring machine drives on a mine project, says its contractor, while another secured a design-build contract for the country's longest road tunnel,
One tunnel boring machine has made headway drilling a new 5,700-ft-long tube for the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel, part of a $756-million project to eliminatie a longstanding bottleneck by connecting parallel above-water segments constructed in 1995 to carry southbound traffic.
Robotic arms for tunnel-boring machines, concrete reinforcement made of old wind turbine blades and machine learning to reduce concrete waste are among innovations emerging from the $16.7-billion civil construction program for the U.K.’s London to Birmingham high-speed railroad. Construction began late last year.
