Hi Jonn – I hope you’re well. This is just a quick note to see if you would be interested in a guided tour of one of HS2’s first two tunnelling machines (TBMs)... They are essentially huge underground factories that excavate the chalk and build the walls around themselves as they push forward. 

Thus read an email from a chap in the PR team at HS2. I’d been looking for something to do on Compendium publication day that wasn’t either “same as any other day” or “wander round bookshops worrying about my lack of prominence”, so a morning under a hill learning about tunnel boring seemed like a great idea. What’s more, the other journalists going were a cross-section of a) the Twitter rail nerd elite, and b) my mates. It’d be like a school trip, but for grown ups. I had to say yes, right?

So, I did. On a sunny Thursday in mid-September, I got up at an hour I hadn’t risen at in years and travelled to the far western reaches of the Central line in search of something boring. 

I was expecting to learn things. I was expecting to have fun. What I was not expecting, though, was that there’d be a moment that felt akin to how I imagine religious people experience faith, in which I stood looking at the magnitude of creation and felt genuinely overcome by emotion.

Here’s what I learned… click here to read more about Jonn’s visit to see the HS2 TBMs Cecilia and Florence.