The Queen, accompanied by The Duke of Edinburgh, formally launched High Speed 1 (HS1), the UK’s first section of high speed railway and officially opened St Pancras International Station, on Tuesday 6 November 2007. Commercial services operated by Eurostar, started on the 14 November 2007.

In September 2003, the first section of the HS1 was completed on time and within budget. The completion of Section 2 and the refurbishment of St Pancras station, again, on time and within budget, in 2007, marked the end of this most extraordinary project.

More than just a railway, HS1 has leveraged more than £10 billion of investment in regeneration schemes around the new international stations of Ebbsfleet, Stratford and St Pancras. Trains travelling on the high-speed line create up to ten times less carbon emissions than the low-cost airlines on equivalent journeys.

With High Speed 1, the UK is fully connected to the growing European high-speed network, a network that stretches across 3,750km (2,330 miles) from The Netherlands and Germany, to Italy, Spain and beyond. Now more than ever, high-speed rail is seen as the seamless, direct and environmentally friendly way to travel long distances.

In 2009, Southeastern’s domestic high-speed services will be launched on HS1, dramatically shortening journey times to the Thames Gateway and Kent. It will take just over half an hour to get from London to Ashford, and only 1 hour from London to Canterbury.

Rail Link Engineering (RLE), a consortium of Arup, Bechtel, Halcrow and Systra, is the designer and project manager of Sections 1 and 2 of High Speed 1

Key project facts

	HS1 consists of 109km of high-speed railway, over 20km of twin-bore tunnels, 150 bridges, 3 major viaducts. The Medway Viaduct is the longest single span high-speed rail viaduct in the world.
	HS1 tunnelled underneath 2,600 properties, 67 bridges, 12km of surface railway, 600 pipelines and four Tube stations. Engineers tunnelled within 4.3 metres of London Underground’s Central line without the need to halt services. In April 2003, the tunnel gang operating tunnel boring machine, Annie, achieved a record breaking total advance of 27 metres in a single 12 hour shift.
	A novel approach to negotiating Essex’s QEII bridge involved threading a rail viaduct through the gap between the Essex viaduct and the QEII bridge - the engineering equivalent of ‘threading the eye of a needle’. HS1’s overhead power lines are within 750mm of the bridge.
	HS1 engineers completed one of the UK’s largest ever bridge slides. The 111 metre rail bridge, weighing over 9,000 tonnes, was slid into place to reconnect the North Kent Line over a Bank Holiday weekend.
	In-cab signalling systems are employed on HS1, as at the top speed of 300km/h it is not possible to use trackside signals.
	St Pancras International station has been restored and extended.  New international stations have been built at Stratford in east London and Ebbsfleet in north Kent. A new depot constructed at Temple Mills, near Stratford can house 13 Eurostar trains.
	The project has set new industry standards in safety, receiving 19 health & safety awards. Ten HS1 construction sites have reached over 1 million man hours without a reportable accident.
	The project facilitated one of the largest archaeological investigations in Europe. At Ebbsfleet, an Anglo-Saxon water mill and a Roman town with seven temples was unearthed. An Anglo-Saxon cemetery was discovered in Saltwood near Folkestone and perhaps the most exciting find was the skeleton of a giant elephant, Palaeoloxodon antiquus dating from 400,000 years ago.
	13 listed buildings have been moved and preserved including the 16th Century Bridge House in Sellindge, which was slid 100 metres away from the HS1 route.
	Preservation of the local ecology along the route included creating 78 new artificial roosts for bats including a bat cave, eight new ponds for amphibians, 6 new artificial badger sets and track crossing points, a new habitat for the nationally rare flower Grey Mouse-Ear, re-introduction of over 100 hazel dormice from Kent into other UK woodlands as part of a species recovery programme as well as mitigation for water vole populations. Over one million new trees and shrubs have been planted and 255ha of new woodland created on the project.

Scope of services

Rail Link Engineering provided design and project management services to support the development of High Speed 1.