The tunnelling work is part of the in-construction London to Birmingham high-speed railway line.
This section is the first of 64 miles of intricate tunnels that will built as part of Europe’s largest infrastructure project. The 10m-wide machine spent around 8 months underground creating the tunnel, before breaking through at Long Itchington Wood in Warwickshire late last week.
Named after Dorothy Hodgkin, the first British woman to win the Nobel Prize in chemistry in 1964, Dorothy is one of HS2’s 10 custom-built tunnel boring machines and was manufactured in Germany by Herrenknecht. Her operation required around 400 workers, adding to the over 25,000 jobs created through HS2 so far.
HS2 minister Trudy Harrison said: “This is, quite literally, a ground-breaking moment - demonstrating that we are getting on with delivering on our promises and progressing our transformative plans to boost transport, bring communities together and level up the north and...