Over the bank holiday weekend, HS2 engineers began lifting the last of four tunnelling machines to the surface.

The machine is named ‘Anne’, after Lady Anne Byron (1792 – 1860), who was an educational reformer and philanthropist. In 1834, Lady Anne set up the Ealing Grove School, the first co-operative school in England to provide education for working-class children in west London.

The name was chosen by a public vote from a shortlist of five famous women, each of whom has a connection to Ealing.

The first part of Anne, including its 9.11m diameter cutterhead, emerged into daylight for the first time in 16 months as engineers lifted it out of a shaft at Green Park Way in Greenford, west London, on Sunday (24 August).

Anne weighs a total of 1,700 tonnes and is around 150 metres long. Because of its vast size, engineers have to lift it out of the shaft in sections. To do this, they use a giant gantry crane.

Anne is one of four Tunnel Boring Machines (TBMs) which have together excavated the 8.4-mile-long Northolt tunnels between West Ruislip and HS2’s new station at Old Oak Common. Anne was the last of the four TBMs to begin working on the tunnel, having been put into action in April last year.

The three other tunnel boring machines have already finished their work, with Emily (named after Emily Sophia Taylor, who helped establish the Perivale Maternity Hospital in 1937 and became Ealing’s first female mayor in 1938) breaking through at Green Park Way in June.

Emily had begun boring in February 2024, having been launched from HS2’s Victoria Road Crossover Box near Old Oak Common and working towards Greenford.

The tunnelling effort reached its halfway point in July last year.

The TBMs worked from each end of the two tunnels and met in the middle. In the process, they excavated more than 4 million tonnes of London Clay.

They also installed nearly 100,000 concrete segments, which form the walls of the tunnels. The earth and clay that has been excavated during the construction of this and other London HS2 tunnels will be used in local green spaces and community projects.