Gerrards Cross Tunnel

Gerrards Cross Tunnel is a 310-metre-long (340 yd) railway tunnel in Gerrards Cross, Buckinghamshire, on the Chiltern Main Line, next to the railway station. The purpose of the tunnel was to enable a new Tesco supermarket to be built over the railway line. Plans were initially met with anger by local residents, and the council refused planning permission, but this decision was overturned by Secretary of State for the Environment, Transport and the Regions John Prescott. During construction of the tunnel, it partially collapsed on 30 June 2005. No-one was injured in the accident, although a train heading towards the tunnel when it collapsed had to perform an emergency stop. Early reports suspected the cause was the backfilling operation. An initial freedom of information request on 10 December 2020 was denied; however, a later request in 2022 was successful, and confirmed the cause of collapse to be the backfilling operation. Despite the incident, the construction continued in 2007 with different contractors building the tunnel. The store opened in November 2010, fourteen years after the project was commissioned.

Tunnel data from Wikidata (CC0). Summary from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA).