A Very English Construction Project

Any seasoned commuter will tell you that over time you learn to calculate the distance remaining to your stop not by looking up at the scrolling on-board screen or by swinging your head left to right to catch station names as platforms flash past, but by using your peripheral senses to keep a constant monitor on your whereabouts. A bend in the track, A highway passing beneath you, a clearing in the trackside brush. Anyone of these minor deviations from the norm can be detected while reading the paper or sending emails and will act as a nearly subconscious indicator as to your whereabouts. None are easier to read along the Chiltern Line than the low-lying horizontal halogen lighting which illuminates the Gerrards Cross tunnel.

Ah....the Gerrards Cross tunnel. A 300m long never-ending paean to modern English engineering prowess. For those unfamiliar with the original intention, Tesco was to cover a length of track east of the station, pile landfill on top of it (so it's not even really a tunnel) and thereby create a new patch of real estate upon which Tesco would construct a supermarket, and presumably a few hundred much-needed parking spaces. Brilliant.

So in the face of 90% local opposition they moved forward with the project. That was in....2004. In 2005...the tunnel collapsed, narrowly missing a west-bound train which had already departed Denham Golf Course and in full view of passengers waiting on the Gerrards Cross platform. Oops. The mess, which was blamed on a torrential rainfall the previous day, was tidied up and after a period of assessment and consultation the project resumed again. Five years on and the site still looks like...well, a site, and the good citizens of Gerrards Cross are no closer to having a new Tesco, the added parking spaces or even just the absence of a gigantic eye-sore in the middle of the town. In fact, it doesn't even look as though they have fully buried the concrete tubing over the tracks yet. I'm no engineer...but how hard can this be?!

A quick comparison for you. The Channel Tunnel connecting Britain to France took six years to complete and covers a distance of 38kms. The Gerrards Cross tunnel connecting Gerrards Cross to, erm, Gerrards Cross has thus far also taken six years to complete and covers a distance of roughly 300m.

We all know these things are never as easy as they look, but surely this project cannot be nearly as hard as they're making it look.