Heathrow Airside Road Tunnel


The Heathrow Airside Road Tunnel is a tunnel at Heathrow Airport. It connects the airside roads around Terminals 1, 2 and 3 to those around Terminal 5. The tunnel was opened to traffic in March 2005 and is used only by vehicles with security clearance to drive airside.
The ART is long, consisting of of twin-cell cut and cover box at each end, linked by a pair of long bored tunnels. The ART was designed and built between 1999 and 2004 by a team of engineers from the BAA, Amec, Laing O'Rourke, Morgan Est-Vinci and Mott MacDonald.
The bored tunnels have internal diameter of and were driven by a diameter Herrenknecht earth pressure balance tunnel boring machine. The excavations were lined with a bolted concrete lining thick: these are unusually strong tunnel segments, required because the ART is so close to the surface and, at one point, passes over the top of the Heathrow Express tunnel to Terminal 4.
Each bore contains an unusual road layout, consisting of a single carriageway wide; just wide enough to allow an airport bus to drive past another bus stopped at the side of the road. The two tunnels are linked by escape cross-passages at intervals of.

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