Photo credit: Grimshaw & Hufton + Crow

High Speed 2 (HS2) is a 140-mile-long (225km) high-speed railway between London and Birmingham currently under construction. Align (a joint venture of Bouygues Travaux Publics, Sir Robert McAlpine, and Volkerfitzpatrick) was awarded the Central 1 (C1) Main Works Contract, which consists of 23.9 km of high-speed rail infrastructure. This section features a 3.4km viaduct, a 16km twin-bored tunnel with 5 ventilation/access shafts, 5km of engineering earthworks, two highway overbridges, one footbridge and a green overbridge.

The Colne Valley Viaduct is a precast post-tensioned segmental viaduct with approach embankments, extending from the Northolt Tunnel at the southern end of the Colne Valley Regional Park to the north embankment located on the edge of the Colne Valley Western Slopes. It is the longest railway bridge in the UK. The viaduct is located in a diverse and continuously changing landscape of water bodies intertwined with woodlands, spanning major roads and a waterway such as Moorhall Road, the Grand Union Canal and the A412.

As part of the Align-D JV working with Jacobs and Align, Rendel and Ingerop provided tender, scheme, detailed design and construction support services for the Colne Valley Viaduct, associated approach embankments and ground levels works to the design-and-build contractor, Align JV. The services provided included integrated designs for the viaduct and other bridges and structural elements considering construction sequence locked-in effects and time dependent effects; geotechnical modelling and ground risk assessments; soil-structure interaction analysis; design of underground and other earth-retaining structures; highway designs for road diversions, realignments, new junctions, new access roads compounds and transformer sites, pavements, emergency hard standings and vehicle swept path analysis. Rendel produced federated 3D models of the designs to meet the client’s BIM and data management requirements.

Awards

  • IABSE Awards 2025 – Winner, Large Road and Rail Bridges
  • British Construction & Infrastructure (BCI) Awards 2025 – Project Team Excellence Award, Align JV Colne Valley Viaduct Team
  • New Civil Engineer Awards 2025 – Bridge Consultant of the Year

PROJECT DETAILS

Location: London – Birmingham, UK
Client: Align JV/(Bouygues Travaux Publics, Volker Fitzpatrick & Sir Robert McAlpine)
Date: 2016 – ongoing
Services: Tender design, scheme design, detailed design, construction phase and handover support