00:00Like a Greek temple, its pillars rise towards the sky.
00:03Its enormous concrete cavern holds enough space to fit the Burj Khalifa on its side.
00:08Its recently dug tunnels run under West London like the city's veins,
00:12and a single lonely sign reads Old Oak Common,
00:16longing for commuters and tourists to fill the huge platforms that lay in front of it.
00:21This is soon to be London's next great railway station,
00:24and one of the best connected rail hubs in the country.
00:27This is the largest station built in London for, must be at least 100 years.
00:33HS2 has taken an enormous step towards completion,
00:36after tunnel mining teams broke through to the kilometre-long concrete box
00:40holding Old Oak Common Station.
00:42Roughly the weight of 14,000 double-decker buses has been excavated
00:47to connect the rail hub to the rest of the HS2 route,
00:50with tunnellers continuing to dig through the other side into Euston,
00:53expected to reach there by mid-2027.
00:56Trains that can travel at speeds of up to 200 miles per hour
01:00will whiz through these tunnels from Euston, in the heart of London,
01:03all the way to Birmingham, in around 45 minutes.
01:06It's expected to more than double seat capacity
01:09between the capital and Birmingham during peak times.
01:12All deep bore tunnels to connect the two cities are now complete,
01:16while more than 80% of the railway's major structures have been finished.
01:20Those services aren't expected to run from Old Oak Common until around 2036 to 2039.
01:27Connectivity really drives economic growth, jobs and homes.
01:30You can see in Stratford already a huge number of new homes,
01:36thousands and thousands of new jobs, a new cultural centre,
01:39caused by the connectivity of Stratford,
01:42which enabled the Olympics to happen, but has been generated afterwards.
01:45The mayor's plans to have Stratford properly connected at last to the continent
01:50will obviously give that a boost.
01:52Here at Old Oak Common, the thing's exactly the same.
01:55Once full construction is complete, this once unknown slice of West London,
02:00merely a stone's throw away from Wormwood Scrubs Prison,
02:02will have connections to HS2, the Heathrow Express,
02:06the Elizabeth Line, via a new stop on the line,
02:08and Great Western Railway services to Bristol, Wales, Devon and Cornwall,
02:13with potential for further connections to the Central Line,
02:16just 300 metres away at North Acton,
02:18and the West London Orbital, a planned overground line between Hendon and Hounslow.
02:23In fact, the effects HS2 will bring to the area are already noticeable,
02:27with huge flats being built all around North Acton,
02:31unrecognisable from what it looked like 10 years ago.
02:33North Acton looks completely different,
02:35even from what it looked like 10 years ago.
02:38I was a bus conductor on the 266 in 1976,
02:42and North Acton was a very different place then.
02:44This is going to be another burgeoning area of jobs and homes in London,
02:50driving the London economy.
02:52But it hasn't come cheaply or quickly.
02:54The full service from Euston to Birmingham
02:56and a connection to the West Coast mainline
02:58is not expected to run until between 2040 and 2043.
03:03With the leg further north to Manchester,
03:05having been controversially cancelled.
03:07Costs have also soared,
03:09with the project totalling as high as £102 billion.
03:13Look at the architecture,
03:14look at the size of it,
03:15it's going to be absolutely wonderful.
03:17And of course, like the Elizabeth Line,
03:19the day it opens,
03:20everybody will have forgotten
03:21how long it took and how much it cost,
03:24but they'll be concentrating on the benefits.
03:26And I think we'll see here
03:27a huge benefit to the economy of London,
03:30driven by this railway,
03:31and of course the economy of Birmingham
03:33and further north as the trains get further north.
