Catesby Tunnel, Northamptonshire, looking north

The planning process for High Speed 2, the rail link from London north to Manchester and Leeds, is crawling inexorably forward, creating controversy in the conservation community and for Conservative MPs whose constituencies lie in its path.

A recent edition of the Society for the Preservation of Ancient Building magazine, Cornerstone (Vol 31, No 4, 2010), likened the new line to the Iron Curtain, declaring that in bridging the North-South divide its path would split “East Britain from West”.

When it comes to the crunch, we all have a hidden Nimby [Not in my back yard] and nobody takes kindly to reductions in the value and amenity of their home and their community.

It’s noticeable that the proposed alignments make little use of the long abandoned route of the former Great Central Railway as a means of threading High Speed 2 through the environmentally and politically sensitive areas of the Home Counties.

The Great Central was the brainchild of a remarkable Victorian businessman, Sir Edward Watkin (1819-1901).  He was general manager (1854-1862) and chairman (1864-1894) of the Manchester, Sheffield & Lincolnshire Railway, known to its despairing passengers as “Mucky, Slow & Late” and to its shareholders as “Money Sunk & Lost”.  He also had interests in the Metropolitan Railway, the East London Railway that ran through the Brunels’ Thames Tunnel, the South Eastern & Chatham Railway, the Submarine Continental Railway, promoted in 1881 with capital of £250,000 to build the Channel Tunnel, and the Chemin de Fer du Nord running from Calais to Paris.

His folie de grandeur was to turn the MS&L, a provincial line running east-west between Grimsby and Manchester, into the last main line to London, running 94 miles from Annesley Junction in Nottinghamshire by way of the Metropolitan Railway to a purpose-built terminus at Marylebone, passing through Nottingham, Leicester, Rugby and nowhere else of any importance.  Renamed Great Central in 1897, it cost £11½ million:  wits declared that money sunk and lost was “Gone Completely”.  It opened with no fanfare in 1899.

Its engineering was the steam-age equivalent of High Speed 2.  No curve was sharper than a one-mile radius and huge cuttings and embankments kept the gradients under 6%.  All the intermediate stations were built on island platforms with space for future quadrupling of the tracks.  The Marylebone terminus included spare land for additional platforms.  Overbridges, tunnels and station platforms were designed to continental loading-gauge to allow through running of European rolling stock if the Victorian Channel Tunnel had ever been built.

Watkin’s dream, of direct train services between Manchester and Paris via Sheffield, Nottingham, Leicester, the Thames Tunnel and a yet unbuilt Channel Tunnel, evaporated.  The entire line south of Sheffield and north of Aylesbury was closed in the 1960s, though much of the trackbed south of Leicester remains derelict but intact.

No doubt there are weighty practical reasons why high-speed trains can’t simply be sent up the old Great Central.  It’s ironic that Watkin’s visions (which also included a version of the Eiffel Tower started, but later scrapped, on the site that became Wembley Stadium) were so prescient, yet bore fruit in ways he’d have found hard to recognise.

To gain an idea of what is left of the Great Central route from Leicester southwards, see http://www.gcrleicester.info/index.html.  Better illustrations of Catesby Tunnel than the hand-held, daylit shot-in-the-dark above are at http://www.forgottenrelics.co.uk/tunnels/gallery/catesby.html, along with John Quick’s article at http://www.forgottenrelics.co.uk/routes/willoughby.html which indicates that a proposal to route one track of High Speed 2 through Catesby Tunnel alongside a new parallel bore was considered and rejected.

What was built of the Submarine Continental Railway Company’s 1880 Channel Tunnel is illustrated at http://www.subbrit.org.uk/sb-sites/sites/c/channel_tunnel_1880_attempt/index.shtml.

The Stray, Harrogate, North Yorkshire

One of the glories of Harrogate is The Stray, over two hundred acres of green space set aside by the Forest of Knaresborough Enclosure Act of 1780 so that the area “would for ever hereafter remain open and unenclosed, and all persons whomsoever shall and may have free access at all times to the said springs, and be at liberty to use and drink the Waters there arising, and take the benefit thereof…”

Recurrent battles have been fought since then to keep the Stray as free as possible of public conveniences, road-widening and other incursions.  Of these controversies the most difficult was over bringing a much-needed direct railway to the town.

The Harrogate view was that trains should neither seen nor heard.  When the York & North Midland Railway reached the town, it tunnelled under Langwith Avenue south of the Stray and opened its Harrogate terminus at Brunswick Station, south of the West Park Stray, in July 1848.

Eventually, in the early 1860s a through line was built across the Stray in an unobtrusive shallow cutting.

Brunswick Station closed in 1862 and completely disappeared.  Its site was filled in and handed over as part of the Stray.  Not a single photograph of the buildings has been found.  The site is marked only by a small stone plaque.

However, the approach tunnel remains.  Even though it hasn’t seen a train since shortly after 1862 it remains in good condition, and the indentations of the sleepers are still visible in the ballast.  Part of it was used as a Second World War air-raid shelter until 1943.

It is practically inaccessible, but was surveyed and recorded and by the Leeds Historical Expedition Society in January 2008 and by Subterranea Britannica in the following September.  Comprehensive illustrations of its present condition can be found at http://www.subbrit.org.uk/sb-sites/sites/b/brunswick_tunnel/index.shtml
http://www.lostrailwayswestyorkshire.co.uk/Leeds%20Harrogate.htm, http://blogs.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=blog.view&friendID=265602590&blogID=351327703 with additional material at http://www.aeden.plus.com/norwood/frames.htm.

What remains of the approach to the former Brunswick Station is strictly private and off-limits to the general public.

Pontcysyllte Aqueduct, Ellesmere Canal

Pontcysyllte is one of the major triumphs of British canal engineering, and the most spectacular travellers’ experience on British waterways, whether you walk or sail across it.  The 1,007-foot long aqueduct carries the waters of the Ellesmere Canal 126 feet above the River Dee.

Vertigo can be a problem.  Whenever I’ve taken groups to Pontcysyllte there’s no guarantee they’ll all walk the length of the towpath, despite the protection of railing five feet high;  indeed, I know of people who only managed to sail across by lying on the floor of their boat with their eyes closed.

Industrial archaeologists argue over how to apportion credit for this magnificent structure.  The engineer of the Ellesmere Canal was William Jessop (1745-1814), well-established, busy and – it has to be admitted – not always successful in building masonry aqueducts.  At the Dee crossing, one of Jessop’s team had suggested dropping the canal down each side of the valley by flights of locks to a low-level three-arch aqueduct:  this idea amounted to throwing two lockfuls of water away for every boat that crossed.  Jessop pointed out that a smaller number of locks feeding into a taller aqueduct would save a third of construction costs, but still use up huge amounts of water.

When Thomas Telford (1757-1834) was appointed to take direct charge of constructing the canal, with Jessop as consultant, he pointed out that building an iron-trough aqueduct across the valley at the height of the canal would actually cost no more to construct and would speed up traffic by eliminating lockage without any loss of water whatsoever.

Using cast iron for this purpose was a new and virtually untried technique.  Telford took the opportunity to field-test the principle when he took over as engineer of the Shrewsbury Canal and completed the Longdon-on-Tern Aqueduct (1796), and then rehearsed it further down the Ellesmere Canal at Chirk Aqueduct (1801) before ordering the ironwork for Pontcysyllte, which was completed and opened in 1805.

Visiting Pontcysyllte is an unmissable experience, whether by boat or on foot.  From there it’s possible to walk down to Chirk Aqueduct and back within half a day, or to walk into Llangollen in an hour or so.  A more relaxing experience, starting from Llangollen Wharf, is to catch a horse-drawn trip-boat to Pontcysyllte, or a diesel boat across the aqueduct (one way, with a return journey by courtesy coach):  Llangollen Wharf – Aqueduct Trips (horsedrawnboats.co.uk).

The best experience of all, though, once every five years when the ironwork is inspected, is when the waterways engineers pull the plug in the aqueduct bed, sending the canal water cascading down to the Dee.  You have to get up early for that.