Category Archives: Transports of Delight

Not one of Brunel’s best ideas

Leave a Reply
Atmospheric railway track, Didcot Railway Centre

Atmospheric railway track, Didcot Railway Centre

Starcross Pumping Station, Devon

Starcross Pumping Station, Devon

To modern eyes the atmospheric railway, with its leather flaps and rats in the pipes, seems a Heath Robinson contraption, but when it was devised by a gas engineer, SamueI Clegg, and the brothers Jacob and Joseph Samuda and patented in 1839 it attracted the serious attention of the brightest brains in the engineering profession.

The idea was to evacuate the air from a tube between the rails, so that the vacuum in front of a piston underneath the train would cause air behind the vehicles to propel them forward at speed, without the weight of a heavy locomotive and the fuel it had to carry.  The slot that admitted the piston was sealed by leather flaps that maintained the vacuum before and after the train passed.

This worked quite well on a 1¾-mile extension of the Dublin & Kingstown Railway in Ireland.  This former horse tramway had an average gradient of 1 in 110, and opened in 1843.

Trains carrying up to two hundred passengers weighing 38 gross tons were propelled by the vacuum in a tube between the running rails at speeds of up to 40mph.

On one occasion the piston carriage set off without its train, and covered the entire line in 75 seconds at an average speed of 84mph.

The London & Croydon Railway ran trains using the atmospheric system between Dartmouth Arms (now Forest Hill) and Croydon from January 1846.

The interior of the pipe was sealed by a mixture of tallow fat and beeswax which melted in hot weather and attracted rats, whose corpses were regularly evacuated each morning.

In frosty weather the leather flaps froze stiff and broke away and snow, instead of rats, got into the tube.

The system was so unreliable that it soon gave way to steam locomotives and the tube was dismantled after May 1847.

Brunel was attracted to the apparent advantages of the atmospheric principle so that he could take the South Devon Railway around the south coast from Exeter to Newton Abbot, where the gradients and tight curves were challenging to contemporary locomotives.

He was unconcerned when questioned about the wisdom of adapting the workings of a 1¾-mile branch line to a fifty-mile main line.

Daniel Gooch, the young locomotive engineer of the Great Western Railway, remarked, “I could not understand how Mr Brunel could be so misled.  He had so much faith in his being able to improve it that he shut his eyes to the consequences of failure.”

The first atmospheric passenger trains between Exeter and Teignmouth ran on September 13th 1847 and to Newton Abbot on January 10th 1848.  The entire service was operated by atmospheric propulsion from February 23rd 1848.

The new system was much admired for the lack of noise, smuts and smoke, and in the first few months barely 1% of atmospheric trains were more than ten minutes late.  A 28-ton train could reach an average speed of 64mph over three miles.

On January 18th 1848, however, cold weather froze the leather and no trains ran until the afternoon.  Increasingly, the leather flaps tore away from their fixings, allowing air leakages to diminish the partial vacuum.  The underpowered steam pumping engines broke down repeatedly and coal consumption was excessive.

Everyone was aware that the London & Croydon Railway had given up on the atmospheric system in May 1847, and through the summer the directors and Brunel himself backpedalled.

The last atmospheric train ran on September 10th 1848.

The most visible reminder of the atmospheric railway is the pumping station alongside Starcross station which was used as a Methodist chapel from 1867 to 1958, while the boiler house became a coal store.

The entire building opened as a museum of the atmospheric railway in 1982 and is now the headquarters of the Starcross Fishing & Cruising Club.

Preparatory work for a road scheme has discovered the remains of a hitherto unsuspected fragment of the pumping station:  http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-devon-44099898.

The 36-page, A4 handbook for the 2017 Railways of Devon tour, with text, photographs, maps and a reading list, is available for purchase, price £10.00 including postage and packing.  To order a copy, please click here or, if you prefer, send a cheque, payable to Mike Higginbottom, to 63 Vivian Road, Sheffield, S5 6WJ.

One of Brunel’s best ideas

Leave a Reply
Royal Albert Bridge, Saltash, Devon

Royal Albert Bridge, Saltash, Devon

The career of Isambard Kingdom Brunel (1806-1859) is punctuated by two great bridges.  His first major project was the Clifton Suspension Bridge, begun in 1831 but completed posthumously in 1864.  Towards the end of his life he devised and constructed the Royal Albert Bridge, Saltash, to carry the railway across the Tamar into Cornwall.

Throughout his working life his professional rival, Robert Stephenson (1803-1859), was also a close personal friend and ally.

Brunel supported Stephenson at the enquiry into the Dee Bridge collapse in 1847, which first exposed the weakness of long cast-iron girders to support railway locomotives.

The two of them regularly discussed how to bridge wide waterways at height as Stephenson designed the High Level Bridge in Newcastle-on-Tyne (1849) and the box-girder bridges at Conwy (1849) and Menai (1850).

A suspension bridge such as Brunel’s design at Clifton was useless to carry a railway, because the weight of the locomotive would cause the chains to deflect dangerously.

When Brunel took the South Wales Railway across the River Wye at Chepstow in 1852, crossing from an abrupt cliff to a flat flood plain, his solution was to brace the suspension chains with circular tubes.

His great bridge across the wide Tamar estuary, linking Devon and Cornwall by rail, had to leave 100 feet of headroom for passing ships.  Its approaches had to be on curved viaducts.

So his freestanding central spans combine the three classic types of bridge – beam, arch and chain.  He developed the Chepstow design by changing the circular tube to an oval profile, bowed in the form of a convex truss to brace the vertical suspension chains.

Each span was fabricated in turn on the Devonport bank of the river, floated out into the stream and then jacked into position, three feet at a time, as the piers were built.

Brunel conducted the complex positioning of the first, western span in a two-hour process, watched by thousands in complete silence until the Royal Marines Band struck up ‘See the Conquering Hero Comes’ to signal success.

By the time the bridge was finished in 1859 Brunel was so ill that he missed the royal opening ceremony.

He only once saw his great work in its completed state, when he was drawn gently across the bridge in a coach secured to an open rail wagon.

He died on September 15th the same year, and his friend Robert Stephenson followed him a month later on October 12th.  Both of them suffered from what was then called Bright’s disease.

The Cornwall Railway subsequently added the tribute ‘I K BRUNEL – ENGINEER – 1859’ to each end of the bridge.

The 36-page, A4 handbook for the 2017 Railways of Devon tour, with text, photographs, maps and a reading list, is available for purchase, price £10.00 including postage and packing.  To order a copy, please click here or, if you prefer, send a cheque, payable to Mike Higginbottom, to 63 Vivian Road, Sheffield, S5 6WJ.

Haytor Granite Tramway

Leave a Reply
Haytor Granite Tramway, Dartmoor, Devon

Haytor Granite Tramway, Dartmoor, Devon

In the days before the steam locomotive made railways the obvious means of moving heavy loads at speed, guided transport was often based not on rails but on angle plates which controlled the direction of carts with plain wheels that could also run on roads.

The Haytor Granite Tramway is a highly unusual – indeed, almost unique – alternative that arose from the remoteness of Devon from the rest of England before the age of steam railways.

Dartmoor granite, hard-wearing but workable, was in great demand in the early nineteenth century:  Sir Robert Smirke favoured it for his extension to the British Museum (1823-31) and the General Post Office at St Martin’s-le-Grand (1825-9) and John Rennie used it for his London Bridge (1825-31).

George Templer (1781-1843) linked the Haytor quarries to the Stover Canal at Ventiford by means of a tramway quite unlike the plateways that prevailed in the north of England and the Midlands.  Whereas such plateways or gangroads guided smooth-wheeled wagons by means of cast iron flanged rails secured by stone blocks at regular intervals, the Haytor Granite Tramway dispensed with iron from outside the region and instead used the indigenous granite.

The track of the Tramway consists simply of granite blocks, shaped so that an upstand, 4ft 3in across, guided the iron-wheeled wagons along the route.  Where turnouts were needed, “point tongues” were provided, made of either iron or wood.  Apart from one short section at the exit of Holwell Quarry, the entire seven-mile length of the route from the quarries down to Ventiford was a downgrade, so that the teams of horses hauled the empty trains uphill, and followed the loaded wagons downhill presumably to provide braking.  A train of a dozen wagons was handled by a team of eighteen horses.

The total fall in altitude along the seven-mile main line was 1,300 feet.  There was an additional two or three miles of granite track serving half a dozen quarries around Haytor.

The tramway was out of use by 1858.  It was practically superseded by the broad-gauge Moretonhampstead & South Devon Railway when it opened in 1866, but substantial lengths of the granite track remain in situ and can be followed across the moor and down into the Teign valley

The 36-page, A4 handbook for the 2017 Railways of Devon tour, with text, photographs, maps and a reading list, is available for purchase, price £10.00 including postage and packing.  To order a copy, please click here or, if you prefer, send a cheque, payable to Mike Higginbottom, to 63 Vivian Road, Sheffield, S5 6WJ.

Morwellham Quay

Leave a Reply
Morwellham Quay, Devon

Morwellham Quay, Devon

Devon and Cornwall lie far from the industrial heartlands of England, so in the period before the railways supplies of coal and iron were costly and difficult to transport to the mines, quarries and manufactories of the South West.  Yet the products of the region – tin, copper, silver, lead, manganese, arsenic, fluorspar, china clay, pottery, slate and granite – were periodically in high demand in the rest of Great Britain and overseas.

Morwellham Quay was the northern limit of navigation of the River Tamar, 23 miles inland from the sea, and linked with the stannary town of Tavistock by the 4½-mile Tavistock Canal and an inclined plane that drops 237 feet down to the river, powered by a 28-foot-diameter overshot waterwheel.

The canal was practically superseded in 1859 by the opening of the South Devon & Tavistock Railway, connecting Plymouth with Tavistock, and was eventually sold to the 9th Duke of Bedford for £3,200 in 1873.  It continued in use as a water-supply channel for local industry until 1930.  Three years later the West Devon Electric Supply Co Ltd took the canal over to generate hydro-electricity in a power station adjacent to Morwellham Quay which continues in operation in the ownership of South West Water.

Mining in and around the Tamar valley was subject to great fluctuations both in the availability of ore and the strength of the markets.  The area was boosted by the discovery in 1844 of a huge lode of copper ore, four miles away at a site that was named Wheal Maria.  The lode “was said to span the entire floor of the 10 foot by 10 foot shaft forming a carpet that glittered like gold”.

The Devon Great Consols company was founded in 1846 to develop the mines on the Devon bank of the Tamar Valley.  Such was the excitement that £1 shares traded at up to £800 each.  The landowners, Francis, 7th Duke of Bedford and his son William, 8th Duke, received a total of £182,036 9s 2d in dues, most but not all as an 8% royalty on the extracted ore.

In 1856 the mines yielded 28,836 tons of ore, and were only limited by the capability of the quay to send the materials away.

Latterly, as the stocks of copper declined in the 1870s, demand for arsenic increased, so that Devon Great Consols became the world’s largest supplier, using the arsenopyrite deposits up to six feet thick which had previously been left as valueless.  Arsenic was in demand for use as a pigment and an insecticide.

By the end of the century, however, trade declined and the mines closed in 1901 and were abandoned in 1903.

During the First World War some of the mines reopened for mining arsenic, tin and tungsten and arsenic production continued for a few years after 1918.  The Arsenic Chimney of 1922 at Wheal Fanny dates from this final phase of activity.

Morwellham Quay and the New Quay downstream were abandoned until the 1970s when Morwellham was developed as an educational and tourist attraction and New Quay’s derelict buildings were consolidated.

A battery-operated mine railway made possible public access to the George and Charlotte Mine, and allows the public to view the New Quay site without having to walk down the valley.

In 2010, when Devon County Council withdrew its funding support for Morwellham Quay, the site was taken over by Simon and Valerie Lister, the owners of Bicton Park Botanical Gardens near Budleigh Salterton:  https://www.morwellham-quay.co.uk.

The 36-page, A4 handbook for the 2017 Railways of Devon tour, with text, photographs, maps and a reading list, is available for purchase, price £10.00 including postage and packing.  To order a copy, please click here or, if you prefer, send a cheque, payable to Mike Higginbottom, to 63 Vivian Road, Sheffield, S5 6WJ.

Royal Station Hotel

2 Replies
Former Royal Station Hotel, Hull, now the Mercure Hull Royal Hotel

Former Royal Station Hotel, Hull, now the Mercure Hull Royal Hotel

My Humber Heritage (September 5th-9th 2016) tour had to relocate from the Beverley Arms Hotel, which has ceased trading, to the Mercure Hull Royal Hotel, which had the advantage of being literally across the platform from the trains:  https://www.mikehigginbottominterestingtimes.co.uk/?page_id=4223.

This splendid traditional station hotel was completed in 1849, designed by George Townsend Andrews (1804-1855), house architect for the York & North Midland Railway, as part of the second terminal station into the centre of Hull, replacing an earlier station adjacent to the Humber Dock which then became a goods depot:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manor_House_Street_railway_station#/media/File:Railway_Street_Goods_shed_1905.jpg.

Andrews was also responsible for the original York railway station (1841) and other surviving stations including Whitby, Pickering and Beverley.

The new station was named Hull Paragon because it stood on Paragon Street, which was itself apparently named after a long-vanished pub.  Hull people thought it grossly over-ambitious and called it “Hudson’s Folly”:  the “Railway King” George Hudson was indeed guilty of more than folly, but his station and hotel remain in use, and both have been repeatedly extended.

Andrews’ career as a railway architect seems to have been eclipsed when George Hudson was disgraced for his unscrupulous financial dealings, and the Hull hotel was his final major commission.  At the time it opened it was the largest station hotel in the country, and Andrews’ largest building.

It became the Royal Station Hotel after Queen Victoria’s visit in October 1854, for which a throne room was contrived at the south-east corner of the first floor, along with a bedroom, drawing room and boudoir, and a bedroom and drawing room for the royal children.  The royal household lodged on the second floor.

The following morning she greeted an assembly of Sunday School pupils from the balcony, and then processed through the Old Town to the Corporation Pier, which was renamed the Victoria Pier, and boarded a launch to inspect the docks.

Additional wings to the hotel were designed by the North Eastern Railway’s company architect, the York-born William Bell (1844-1919) and constructed in 1903-5.  Both the station and the hotel were damaged in air raids in both the First and Second World Wars.

The Hull poet Philip Larkin, whose statue by Martin Jennings is on the concourse, found it a gloomy place in 1966 [http://www.poetryconnection.net/poets/Philip_Larkin/4774] though he was apparently a regular customer.

The interior of the present-day hotel is mostly a tasteful pastiche by the Fisher Hollingsworth Partnership, following a fire which gutted the building in 1990:  http://www.hulldailymail.co.uk/remembering-drama-hull-royal-station-hotel-25/story-27933477-detail/story.html.  The hotel reopened in 1992 and has traded happily ever after.

The 80-page, A4 handbook for the 2016 ‘Humber Heritage’ tour, with text, photographs, maps and a reading list, is available for purchase, price £10.00 including postage and packing.  To order a copy, please click here or, if you prefer, send a cheque, payable to Mike Higginbottom, to 63 Vivian Road, Sheffield, S5 6WJ.

Trains to Looe

Leave a Reply

Liskeard railway station, Cornwall: platform 3

Liskeard railway station, Cornwall: platform 3

The train-ride from Liskeard (rhymes with “hard” not “heard”) to Looe is one of the most bizarre as well as attractive journeys on the British rail system.

Trains to Looe start from a platform at right angles to the Cornish main line, and the train sets off northwards, which is disconcerting because Looe is due south.

In the course of two miles the route drops 205 feet by turning 180°, diving under the main line at the 150-foot Liskeard Viaduct, then turning another 180° to face north once more at Coombe Junction Halt, the second least-used station in Britain.  This spectacular loop has a maximum gradient of 1 in 40 and a minimum-radius curve of eight chains (160 metres).

At Coombe Junction the train reverses and trundles down the East Looe valley, a particularly picturesque route past remote little stations, Causeland, Sandplace and St Keyne Wishing Well Halt [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St_Keyne_Wishing_Well_Halt_railway_station], until the river opens out into a wide estuary that divides the towns of East and West Looe.

It’s an idyllic piece of railway with a complex history.

The Liskeard & Looe Canal was opened in 1827-8 to develop a traffic carrying copper and tin ore down the valley, and lime and sea-sand for agriculture upstream.  In 1844 the canal linked end-on with the Liskeard & Caradon Railway, a mineral line serving the mines and granite quarries around Caradon Hill.

There was so much traffic that the canal was replaced in 1860 by the railway down the valley, which handled freight only and remained isolated from the Cornwall Railway main line above.

Passenger services began in 1879, running to the now-closed Moorswater station, a long walk and a stiff climb to the town of Liskeard.

The great loop up to Liskeard was installed in 1901, facilitating a boom in passenger traffic and enabling the development of Looe as a resort.

Somehow this eccentric train service has survived the decline in rail travel, probably because bus services to and from Looe are patchy and it’s not an easy place to reach by car:  http://www.looe.org/buses.html.

It’s a delightful part of the Cornish coast, though, and there’s a particular satisfaction in leaving a main-line express at Liskeard, hiking over to Platform 3 and riding down the valley to the sea.

Runaway tram

Leave a Reply

Snaefell Mountain Railway no 3 (2014)

Snaefell Mountain Railway no 3 (2014)

By a miracle nobody was killed or injured when the Manx Snaefell Mountain Railway no 3 inexplicably ran down the mountain on Wednesday March 30th:  http://www.iomtoday.co.im/news/isle-of-man-news/pictures-runaway-mountain-tram-crash-drama-1-7824668.

Someone must have had a heart-stopping moment when they turned round and found their tram had disappeared.

Fortunately there was no-one on board.

Even more fortunately the tram overturned on the bend before it could reach the road-crossing at the Bungalow. 

A road collision at the Bungalow would certainly have been fatal.  

If instead the tram had continued down the line beyond the Bungalow it would have caused even more destruction, whether somebody had had the presence of mind to set the points to run it into the depot or, worst of all, if it had run on into Laxey, over another main road and into the terminus where there are buildings, crowds of people and possibly other trams.

How an empty, parked tram unexpectedly took off down the steep incline isn’t yet explained, but the restoration of the service within three days indicates confidence that the cause is known and can be certainly avoided in future.  This clip from the Isle of Man News gives more detail:  http://manx.net/tv/mt-tv/watch/77830/tram-crash-update.

There has never before been a runway on the Snaefell Mountain Railway in 120 years of operation, though there was one on the Llandudno funicular Great Orme Railway in 1932.

Certainly no 3 is matchwood.  It can’t be restored in any meaningful sense, though like its companion no 5, destroyed by fire in 1970, it could be replaced by a close facsimile, which may include components from the original.

Update:  News articles about the subsequent analyses of this incident make interesting reading:  http://www.iomtoday.co.im/news/isle-of-man-news/isle-of-man-newspapers-wins-freedom-of-information-appeal-over-snaefell-tram-crash-1-8337886 and http://www.iomtoday.co.im/news/isle-of-man-news/runaway-tram-had-defective-brakes-1-8337906.

The 72-page, A4 handbook for the 2014 Manx Heritage tour, with text, photographs, maps, a chronology and a reading list, is available for purchase, price £10.00 including postage and packing.  To order a copy, please click here or, if you prefer, send a cheque, payable to Mike Higginbottom, to 63 Vivian Road, Sheffield, S5 6WJ.

The flying tram-rail

Leave a Reply

Tram-rail, St Mary Redcliffe churchyard, Bristol

Tram-rail, St Mary Redcliffe churchyard, Bristol

On the evening of Thursday December 12th 1940 my Auntie Edna, then a teenager, put on her dancing shoes and caught a tram into Sheffield city-centre to go dancing.  No sooner had she got there than the sirens sounded and she spent twelve terrifying hours in a shelter as the shops and public buildings above were bombed and burnt down.

The following morning she tramped the three miles back to the family home in the East End to be greeted by her father with “And where the bloody hell have you been?”

He had, of course, spent the night watching the red sky over the city-centre knowing his daughter was out there in great danger.

The city of Bristol suffered a succession of air-raids, one of which, on Good Friday 1941, permanently put the tram system out of use by severing the main power cable at Counterslip Bridge.  The story goes that the last car to Kingswood was pushed by its passengers until it could freewheel to the depot.

I thought of Granddad panicking about his daughter’s safety when I found a fearsome memento of the Bristol Blitz, and of Bristol’s tramway, in the churchyard of the grand parish church of St Mary Redcliffe, round the corner from Temple Meads Station.

A sizeable length of tramrail remains embedded among the graves where it landed as it flew over the houses from an adjacent road.

You wouldn’t have wanted to be about when debris as heavy as several yards of tramrail was flying around.

No wonder Granddad was so upset, and so relieved to see his daughter bedraggled but in one piece after the Luftwaffe bombed Sheffield.

Sheffield Central

Leave a Reply

Park Square supertram junction, Sheffield

Park Square supertram junction, Sheffield

Sheffield’s self-confessed mapaholic, Mike Spick, does a very fine presentation about mapping Sheffield.  It was strongly recommended to me by a friend, and I caught it at a Victorian Society South Yorkshire Group meeting in January 2016.

One map in particular that Mike showed alerted me to a piece of Sheffield history I’d never heard of before.

A plan of c1890-1895 showed a scheme to link Sheffield’s two competing railways, the Midland and what was then the Manchester, Sheffield & Lincolnshire Railway, at a combined triangular station to be called Sheffield Central.

The gradients apparently would have been demanding, because the MS&L (from 1896 renamed the Great Central Railway) runs on a viaduct at the point where the Midland burrows beneath it in a cutting.

Clearly the project came to nothing and as far as I know is not mentioned in published histories, but its chronology explains why the Midland Railway brought in their house architect Charles Trubshaw to double the size of their station in 1905, while the Great Central built a new frontage to Sheffield Victoria in 1908.

The site of the unbuilt triangular station is now occupied by the delta junction which connects the three lines of Sheffield Supertram at Park Square.

Closely-guarded secret

1 Reply
Box Tunnel, Great Western Railway, Wiltshire

Box Tunnel, Great Western Railway, Wiltshire

Isambard Kingdom Brunel’s Box Tunnel is celebrated for its engineering significance – and for its entertaining legends.

Driven through the unfriendly Cotswold geology, at the time of construction it was, at 3,212 yards, the longest railway tunnel in the world, though several earlier canal tunnels were longer.

Furthermore, Brunel designed it on a gradient of 1 in 100, descending from east to west.  Contemporary critics warned against “the concussion of the atmosphere and the vibration” arising from trains labouring up the grade, and predicted a downhill runaway would leave the tunnel at a speed of 120mph, a calculation which failed to account for friction and air-resistance:  Brunel’s more realistic computation arrived at a speed of 56mph.

The tunnel was ready for the first train to run from London to Bristol on June 30th 1841.  The west portal, visible from the main road through the village of Box, is an elaborate classical composition.  Its arch is far taller than necessary, and the rock-hewn bore funnels to the conventional loading-gauge within.  The plainer east portal at Corsham lies in a cutting.

One of the enduring stories about Box Tunnel is that Brunel aligned it so that the sunrise would shine through the dead-straight bore on the morning of his birthday, April 9th.  This is within the range of practical possibility, apparently, but difficult in the circumstances to check.

The underground Bath stone quarries which lie under Box Hill to the north of Brunel’s railway tunnel have excited considerable speculation.

Ridge Quarry was used as an ammunition store in the First World War until 1922, and became Central Ammunition Depot Corsham in 1934-6.  It was used by the RAF until 1955 and then by the Army until 1964.

A much larger complex comprising some 2¼ million square feet of storage space, based on the former Eastlays, Monkton Farleigh and Tunnel Quarries, was adapted in the 1930s as a huge subterranean ammunition store, Central Ammunition Depot Monkton Farleigh.

This wartime facility was supplied by a narrow-gauge railway and inclines connected to a GWR siding at Shockerwick, just outside the east portal of the main-line tunnel.

In 1940 the Bristol Aircraft Company’s experimental section moved into Spring Quarry, and the Ministry of Aircraft Production built an underground aircraft-engine production plant to avoid disruption from bomb-attacks on Bristol.  Despite a reputed final cost of £20 million, the facility allegedly took four years to build, operated for eighteen months up to the end of the War and produced 523 out of a wartime total of 100,932 Bristol aircraft engines.

RAF Box, later known as RAF Rudloe Manor, was established above ground and within a subterranean area known as Brown’s Quarry to act as an important regional headquarters during and after the Second World War.

In the Cold War era part of Spring Quarry was used to build the Central Government War Headquarters, a 240-acre alternative seat for national government in the event of nuclear attack or civil disruption.  Capable of accommodating four thousand staff for up to three months, it drew its water-supply from an underground lake and was equipped with generators and temperature-control, the second largest telephone-exchange in Britain and a BBC broadcasting studio.

Peter Laurie’s early study of covert government infrastructure, Beneath the City Streets:  A Private Inquiry into the Nuclear Preoccupations of Government (Allen Lane 1970;  revised Panther 1979), pointed out that trains running through Box Tunnel audibly traversed a junction, which – he speculated – would allow trains, including the Royal Train from Slough, to disappear into the safety of an underground citadel.

The actual evacuation procedure apparently involved concentrating staff at Kensington (Olympia) station and transporting them by rail via North Pole Junction and Westbury to Warminster, from where they would be conveyed by road to Corsham.

The Prime Minister and his immediate entourage would be the last to arrive, by helicopter directly to Corsham.

The headquarters was apparently abandoned in 2004.

A further facility, the Corsham Computer Centre was established in the former Hudswell Quarry in the 1980s, and remains part of the Bristol Bath Total Facilities Management Project:  http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2003/11/280247.html.

According to internet sources which may not be up to date, Eastlays Quarry is now a bonded warehouse:  http://www.nettleden.com/venues/eastlays-quarry.   Monkton Farleigh Quarry was sold in 1976 and briefly opened as a museum in 1984:  http://www.theurbanexplorer.co.uk/farleigh-down-tunnel-wiltshire.  Ridge Quarry was resold to the original owners in 1975.

In fact, the most accessible information on this former state secret is to be found on the Government website:  https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/324883/Corsham_Tunnel_version1.pdf.

The 72-page, A4 handbook for the 2012 Waterways and Railways between Thames and Severn tour, with text, photographs, maps and a reading list, is available for purchase, price £10.00 including postage and packing.  To view sample pages click here. To order a copy, please click here or, if you prefer, send a cheque, payable to Mike Higginbottom, to 63 Vivian Road, Sheffield, S5 6WJ.