key facts

Project organisation

• 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
• LCR (London and Continental Railways Ltd) has the public-private partnership contract with the UK government to build and operate the HS1.
• Union Railways (North) Ltd, a subsidiary of LCR, the client organisation.

HS1 – an overview

Since September 2003, the first section of the CTRL has been running as one of the country’s most successful and reliable railways, rivaling any train service in the world for punctuality and sheer exhilaration. With a Eurostar top speed of 300kph, it is also the UK’s fastest.

On 14th November 2006, the CTRL was renamed High Speed 1 (HS1) which acts as a powerful reminder of what the railway is all about - the first true high-speed line in the UK.

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 traveling 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 will be fully connected to the growing European high-speed network, a network that now stretches across 3,750 km (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.

On 14 November 2007, High Speed 1 will open. Eurostar will commence commercial services after moving overnight from Waterloo International on 13 November.

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.

High Speed 1 - Vital Statistics

• 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 Bridge House in Mersham, which was slid 100 metres away from the HS1 route, and 15th Century Talbot House in nearby Sellindge which was dismantled and re-erected in another part of the village.
  
  
• Preservation of the local ecology along the route included creating 78 new artificial roosts for bats including a bat cave, 8 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.