EARLY HISTORY OF RAILWAY TUNNELS

This book sets out to tell the story of tunnelling in Britain up to about 1870, covering Robert Stephenson's early tunnels, Brunel and landowners, Shugborough and the Earl of Lichfield, the Castleton cavern, the Liverpool tunnels, the Great Western Railway, the tunnel in art and earliest railway illustrations, the fear of speed and vibration, crime in the carriage, the chance of death in a tunnel, and accidents reported 1830-70. To the directors of early railway companies, planning a route was governed by expense and the most direct way. Avoiding hills could add miles but tunnelling through them could involve vast expense as the Great Western Railway found at Box and the London and Birmingham at Kilsby. Creating a cutting as an alternative was also costly not only in labour and time, but also in compensation for landowners, who opposed railways on visual and social grounds having already seen their land divided by canals. Construction involved millions of bricks or blocks of stone for sufficiently thick walls to withstand collapse. However, the entrance barely seen from the carriage window might be an impressive Italianate arch as at Primrose Hill, or a castellated portal worthy of the Middle Ages as at Bramhope. It uses contemporary accounts, from the dangers of railway travel by Dickens to the excitement of being drawn through the Liverpool Wapping Tunnel by the young composer Mendelssoln. It includes descriptions from early railway company guide books, newspapers and diaries and numerous photographs and coloured architectural elevations from railway archives. 280 pages.