Warwick Tunnelling is a student-led engineering team designing and building a tunnel boring machine to compete in The Boring Company's Not-a-Boring Competition. We're the UK's newest contender in a global field.
Britain is in the middle of a generational tunnelling boom — HS2, Thames Tideway, Lower Thames Crossing, Silvertown — and a deepening shortage of engineers ready to build it.
Warwick Tunnelling exists to put the next generation of UK engineers underground, hands-on, with the skills and machine-time the industry quietly desperately needs.
A purpose-built microTBM, modelled in CAD from cutterhead to thrust plate. Every subsystem is owned, justified, and documented by a student lead.
Manufactured with our own hands where we can, with sponsor and faculty support where we can't. Workshop time is non-negotiable.
Our objective is the same as any TBM crew on Earth: hit the breakthrough portal on alignment, on schedule, in one piece. Then do it faster.
The UK has more major tunnelling work in its pipeline than it has tunnellers to deliver it. The British Tunnelling Society and Crossrail have both flagged the skills gap publicly — every year, more engineers retire than enter the field.
Warwick Tunnelling is one answer: a competition pipeline that produces graduates who already know what a TBM is, how it fails, and how to fix it.
The Boring Company's Not-a-Boring Competition challenges student teams from across the world to design, build, and race tunnel boring machines. We're entering as one of the UK's first.