Construction on our new high-speed railway is making real progress across Aylesbury Vale — and Senior Engagement Manager Kim Birtwistle is here to show you how.
Travelling north from Stoke Mandeville to Quainton, this stretch sees the railway move from the edge of the Chilterns into the flatter Vale of Aylesbury. As the landscape changes, so does the engineering — from cuttings and green tunnel sections into open countryside, where embankments, viaducts and major logistics infrastructure define the route.
In this video:
• How the Stoke Mandeville relief road opened in November 2025, creating a vital link with the Southeast Aylesbury Link Road
• The Princes Risborough rail realignment, opened in 2023 to keep Chiltern Line services running while HS2 is built beneath
• The A418 and A41 road realignments, improving safety and connectivity for drivers and cyclists
• The Thame Valley Viaduct — an 880-metre low-profile structure crossing the River Thame’s floodplain, built using modular construction to cut carbon by around a third
• The Fleet Marston greenway footbridge, a Warren truss structure set to become part of the Waddesdon Greenway Waddesdon cutting, where over 600,000 cubic metres of earth have been excavated — and ichthyosaur fossils discovered
• Quainton railhead, which has brought in over four million tonnes of materials by rail, removing around 100,000 lorry journeys from local roads
• Station Road overbridge, on track to open this summer
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00:00 – Introduction to Aylesbury & Buckinghamshire Progress
01:33 – Stoke Mandeville Relief Road
01:57 – Princes Risborough to Aylesbury Rail Realignment
02:14 – A418 Realignment & Infrastructure
02:41 – Thame Valley Viaduct: Modular Construction
03:15 – Fleet Marston Greenway Footbridge
03:56 – Waddesdon Cutting & Archaeology Finds
04:46 – A41 Realignment & Connectivity
05:16 – Quainton Railhead: Reducing Local Traffic
05:46 – Station Road Overbridge
06:17 – Community Engagement & Environmental Commitment
#HS2 #Buckinghamshire #Aylesbury #ConstructionUpdate #Infrastructure #construction #Rail #engineering
Get in touch: If you have any questions about HS2 or our ongoing works, contact our HS2 Helpdesk team:
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📧 Email: hs2enquiries@hs2.org.uk
27 Comments
Still a nonsense, totally unnecessary ridiculous amount of money wasted, 100 million on a bat tunnel 😂, closed roads, you've now created a gridlock situation in Waddesdon so we'll done tge residents now have pollution at an unacceptable level due to slow or stationary traffic, the embankment from the rerouted A41 from the roundabout after fleet Marston to the Quainton roundabout had trees planted they've all died at a cost of 300,000 pounds, nice one !!
All those machines just say there doing nothing but still on hire😮 ,the bridge at stoke mandible that was built by HS2 has now been demolished must have cost thousands it just a money pit
You pronounced Waddesdon incorrectly 😬
Pity you couldn't get to the North like you promised😢
Looks great so far and Futuristic
Great video, pity to see so much talent wasted on a project like HS2.
I enjoyed the video but was frustrated by your garbled words, im particular place names. Please enunciate your words, speak slightly slower and keep the volume of your voice up. Thank you.
Really interesting video. SPOILT by the sound quality. Lack of high frequencies necessary for female voice. Main problem was the balance between the music and the voice, you could hear the AGC cutting back at the wrong times and the de-noisier doing its stuff. Please correct before the next video, there was so much I missed or was not sure about.
Fantastic update video, can we get one for Warwickshire?
I figure the general public will be more able to understand why the cost is so high if they were made aware of all the additional things HS2 is covering and how they benefit from it.
The message that it's £100bn to knock twenty minutes off the journey time between Acton and Aston is believed by too many people.
Waddesdon cutting, double planted trees because you planted the first trees in the wrong time of the year and they died. Kerching!
Fantastic to see great progress on this mammoth project 😊
This seems like a very expensive project to shave 20 minutes off the trip to Birmingham.
Do you know how annoying it is for locals that you can't even pronounce Waddesdon properly?
I like these videos but her diction is terrible, could hardly understand half of the places she mentioned 🤷♂️
Speaking from someone living nearby, this completely glosses over the complete destruction of the landscape that this project has caused and that we live with every day. The reality of the new A418 alignment is an ugly eyesore. Walking and cycling down what HS2 call the " improved wider" path is deeply unpleasant. The old path was set back from the road with a barrier of trees and greenery and was much safer and more attractive to use. What is worse is that both alternative (pleasant) public footpaths into Aylesbury either side of the bridge have been closed and look like they will be for some time. Hardly the vision of "connecting communities" that HS2 cynically claim.
HS2 still a massive white elephant , a waste of money to take longer to travel from Central London to Birmingham
Why can't people ever pronounce Waddesdon correctly. It's pronounced 'Waddsdon', you don't pronounced the 'e'.
We are "standing on", not we are "stood". Otherwise, very well explained.
Great update.
As a none local it is amazing to see the progress of the route.
Unfortunately the only work I now see is the decommissioning of construction sites on HS2 north of Lichfield🥲
Pointless multi-billion pound government project just to move government civil servants from London to Birmingham.
Corrupt leaders on this project yet no ones being investigated 🤔
Let use no when you have finished 😂
A waste of money, late in completion, environmental impact billions (yes), billions of overspend on a railway we didn’t actually need to get to Birmingham 20 mins faster. Oooh, hold on.
The overheads seem to show many areas where the new link roads involve up to a kilometre of new roadway, and additional roundabouts (brake, slow down, negotiate roundabout, accelerate, and repeat – not the most efficient for environmentally concious driving) in order to avoid crossing the HS2 corridor in the alignment of the original roads., which would have required longer bridge structures.
Also, those two bridges (6:01) are not being built 'side-by-side', they are being built simultaneously.
The trains ordered for HS2 appear to be ones with the European rounded nose and not the long "Kingfisher" nose used by recent Japanese Shinkansen like the E5 and 500 series. The long nose is designed to reduce loud "tunnel boom" when leaving a tunnel. There are a lot of of tunnels on the HS2 route. Hopefully something has been designed to reduce the HS2 noise. Hopefully HS2 will open more freight paths on the West Coast Main Line by moving more passenger trains to HS2. It is difficult to understand why the cost of the railway is so high, when Japan, China, France and other countries have been building very high speed lines since the 1960s.
Update on how you have destroyed the countryside with concrete mess just to get to Birmingham 20 mins sooner…. Thanks