Britain’s longest railway bridge has been completed in South Buckinghamshire as part of the High Speed 2 railway line (HS2).

Engineers laid the final ‘deck segment’ of the 3.4 kilometre-long (2.1 mile) Colne Valley Viaduct near Denham on Thursday.

The structure which will carry trains travelling to and from London to Birmingham at speeds of up to 320km/h (200mph).

The bridge is slightly longer than the 3.3km Tay Bridge linking Fife and Dundee, which had previously been the country’s longest rail bridge since 1887.

On its way out of Greater London, the Colne Valley Viaduct crosses the Grand Union Canal and passes by Denham Waterski Club.

Building work on the viaduct’s deck began in May 2022, with HS2 contractors using a huge launching girder to lower 1,000 segments into place over the following 28 months.

HS2 bosses have claimed that the huge infrastructure project will ‘significantly reduce journey times’ once complete and that it will free up space on the existing mainline for more local and freight services

But HS2 is widely hated in Bucks, not least by the leader of Buckinghamshire Council Martin Tett, who said in October that the railway line had ‘destroyed lives’ in the county.

The unitary authority chief called for Bucks to receive ‘significant compensatory investment’ for HS2’s disruption to residents and ‘devastation’ of the countryside following the cancellation of the project’s Birmingham to Manchester leg.

HS2 has caused huge sinkholes near the Bucks village of South Heath, which residents have called ‘frightening and disgraceful’.