Heathrow Airside Road Tunnel

. It connects the airside roads around Terminals 1, 2 and 3 to the airside roads around Terminal 5.

The ART is 1.42 km long, consisting of 60 m of twin-cell cut and cover box at each end, linked by a pair of 1.3 km bored tunnels. The ART was designed and built between 1999 and 2004 by a team of engineers from BAA (who own the tunnel), AMEC, Laing O'Rourke, Morgan-Vinci JV and Mott MacDonald.

The bored tunnels have internal diameter 8.1 m and were driven by a 9.16 m diameter Herrenknecht earth pressure balance TBM. The excavations were lined with a bolted concrete lining 0.45 m thick: these are unusually strong tunnel segments, required because the ART is so close to the surface and, at one point, passes 3 m over the top of the Heathrow Connect tunnel to Terminal 4.

Each bore contains an unusual road layout, consisting of a single carriageway 6 m wide; just wide enough to allow an airport bus (Cobus 2700) to drive past another bus stopped at the side of the road. The two tunnels are linked by escape cross-passages at intervals of 100–130 m.

The tunnel was opened to airside traffic in March 2005 and is used only by vehicles with security clearance to drive airside. Now that Terminal 5 is fully operational, the ART forms the link between it and the other terminals at Heathrow.

ources

* "Challenging ART for Heathrow," World Tunnelling August 2003, pp 225-229
* [http://www.tunnels.mottmac.com/files/project/3372/Airside_Road_Tunnel.pdf Darby, A., "The Airside Road Tunnel, Heathrow Airport, England," Proceedings of the Rapid Excavation & Tunneling Conference, New Orleans, June 2003, pp 638-647]
* [http://www.morganest.com/Sectors/Tunnels/Terminal-5-Tunnels,-Heathrow-Airport.aspx Morgan Est project page on T5]

External links

* [http://www.vinci-construction.com/appli/wvcgp/wvcgpfr.nsf/web/references.htm Vinci Construction page on all the tunnels at Heathrow T5]
* [http://www.tunnels.mottmac.com/projects/?mode=type&id=3372 Mott MacDonald page on the Heathrow Airside Road Tunnel]
* [http://www.ingenia.org.uk/ingenia/articles.aspx?Index=477 Engineering the space below Terminal 5, "Ingenia" magazine, March 2008]