Video: Giant Warwickshire HS2 tunnel boring machine is lifted out after completing its mission
A giant tunnel boring machine (TBM) used by HS2 in Warwickshire has been lifted out after completing its mission.
TBM Mary Ann, used to excavate the first 3.5 mile section of the Bromford Tunnel between Warwickshire and Birmingham, is now being stripped down ready to be used for a different job somewhere else in the world.
In the process to disassemble the 1,600-tonne machine involved the TBM’s 8.62-metre diameter cutterhead being lifted into the Birmingham skyline by a 700-tonne crawler crane.
The cutterhead, which weighs a whopping 120 tonnes, was expertly lifted out of the 22-metre-deep tunnel portal at Washwood Heath in north Birmingham in just 90 minutes.
A team of 15 engineers will spend the next three months dismantling the 125-metre-long machine, next to the portal in Washwood Heath, before it is returned to the German tunnel boring company Herrenknecht.
The giant machine was named Mary Ann by the local community in a nod to the Warwickshire-born writer better known by her pen name George Eliot.
Its mission started in the Warwickshire village of Water Orton in July 2023 with the breakthrough at the Birmingham end taking place earlier this month
It spent 652 days and nights working underground to excavate the first bore of the Bromford Tunnel with the breakthrough being made on and is expected to be refurbished and adapted ready to meet the technical requirements of its next tunnelling mission.
TBM Elizabeth is currently boring the second section of the Bromford Tunnel with breakthrough expected later this year.