Summit Tunnel in England is one of the world's oldest railway tunnels. It was constructed between 1838 and 1841 by the
Manchester and Leeds Railway
The Manchester and Leeds Railway was a British railway company that built a line from Manchester to Normanton where it made a junction with the North Midland Railway, over which it relied on running powers to access Leeds. The line followed the ...
Company to provide a direct line between
Leeds
Leeds () is a city and the administrative centre of the City of Leeds district in West Yorkshire, England. It is built around the River Aire and is in the eastern foothills of the Pennines. It is also the third-largest settlement (by populati ...
and
Manchester
Manchester () is a city in Greater Manchester, England. It had a population of 552,000 in 2021. It is bordered by the Cheshire Plain to the south, the Pennines to the north and east, and the neighbouring city of Salford to the west. The t ...
. When built, Summit Tunnel was the longest railway tunnel in the world.
The tunnel, between
Littleborough and
Walsden
Walsden (; ) is a large village in the civil parish of Todmorden in the Metropolitan Borough of Calderdale, West Yorkshire, England, though historically partially administered in Lancashire (the Walsden Water as tributary to the Calder servin ...
near
Todmorden
Todmorden ( ; ) is a market town and civil parishes in England, civil parish in the Upper Calder Valley in Calderdale, West Yorkshire, England. It is north-east of Manchester, south-east of Burnley and west of Halifax, West Yorkshire, Hal ...
, was bored beneath the
Pennines
The Pennines (), also known as the Pennine Chain or Pennine Hills, are a range of uplands running between three regions of Northern England: North West England on the west, North East England and Yorkshire and the Humber on the east. Commo ...
, a natural obstruction to most forms of traffic. The tunnel is just over long and carries two
standard-gauge
A standard-gauge railway is a railway with a track gauge of . The standard gauge is also called Stephenson gauge (after George Stephenson), International gauge, UIC gauge, uniform gauge, normal gauge and European gauge in Europe, and SGR in Ea ...
tracks in a single horseshoe-shaped tube, approximately wide and high. Summit Tunnel was designed by
Thomas Longridge Gooch
Thomas Longridge Gooch (1 November 1808 – 23 November 1882) was civil engineer of the Manchester and Leeds Railway from 1831 to 1844.
Biography
Gooch was born on 1 November 1808. He was the eldest son of John and Anna Gooch; John was fro ...
, assisted by Barnard Dickinson. Progress on its construction was slower than anticipated, largely because excavation was more difficult than anticipated. On 1 March 1841, Summit Tunnel was opened by Sir John Frederick Sigismund Smith; it had cost of £251,000 and 41 workers had died.
On 20 December 1984, the
Summit Tunnel fire occurred. There were no deaths and five months later, the tunnel reopened after repairs. The tunnel has remained in continuous use with little interruption since it opened.
Development
![Summit Tunnel ventilation shaft - geograph](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c8/Summit_Tunnel_ventilation_shaft_-_geograph.org.uk_-_739770.jpg)
Summit Tunnel, between Littleborough and Todmorden
is the highest section of the long
Manchester and Leeds Railway
The Manchester and Leeds Railway was a British railway company that built a line from Manchester to Normanton where it made a junction with the North Midland Railway, over which it relied on running powers to access Leeds. The line followed the ...
, which was built parallel to the
Rochdale Canal
The Rochdale Canal is in Northern England, between Manchester and Sowerby Bridge, part of the connected system of the canals of Great Britain. Its name refers to the town of Rochdale through which it passes.
The Rochdale is a broad canal beca ...
. When built, it was the world's longest railway tunnel and a critical element of the first trans-Pennine line.
The tunnel was designed by the
civil engineer
A civil engineer is a person who practices civil engineering – the application of planning, designing, constructing, maintaining, and operating infrastructure while protecting the public and environmental health, as well as improving existing ...
Thomas Longridge Gooch
Thomas Longridge Gooch (1 November 1808 – 23 November 1882) was civil engineer of the Manchester and Leeds Railway from 1831 to 1844.
Biography
Gooch was born on 1 November 1808. He was the eldest son of John and Anna Gooch; John was fro ...
, a collaborator of
George Stephenson
George Stephenson (9 June 1781 – 12 August 1848) was a British civil engineer and mechanical engineer. Renowned as the "Father of Railways", Stephenson was considered by the Victorians a great example of diligent application and thirst for ...
and his son
Robert Stephenson
Robert Stephenson Fellow of the Royal Society, FRS HFRSE FRSA Doctor of Civil Law, DCL (16 October 1803 – 12 October 1859) was an English civil engineer and designer of locomotives. The only son of George Stephenson, the "Father of Railway ...
on several railway schemes.
Between spring 1835 and 1844, Gooch was the engineer for the Manchester and Leeds Railway on behalf of George Stephenson, who was working on other projects. In September 1837, during Gooch's tenure, work commenced boring the tunnel.
Gooch was assisted by Barnard Dickinson. When speaking about the tunnel, Dickinson exclaimed: "This tunnel will defy the rage of tempest, fire, war or wasting age".
[Thacker, Simon]
"The Summit tunnel 175 years on: The miracle of engineering which survived a devastating fire."
''Manchester Evening News'', 28 February 2018. Retrieved 12 June 2018.
The tunnel is long and tall; the horseshoe-shaped bore is wide and accommodates a pair of tracks. The tunnel falls on a gradient of 1-in-330 southwards (towards ). It was driven by hand through shale, coal and sandstone, after which the walls were lined with six courses of brick, using more than 23 million bricks. The bricks were handmade locally and up to 60,000 were laid in a single day.
Mortar, commonly referred to as
Roman cement
Roman cement is a substance developed by James Parker in the 1780s, being patented in 1796.
The name is misleading, as it is nothing like any material used by the Romans, but was a "natural cement" made by burning septaria – nodules that are ...
, was used for its
impermeability to water. It has been estimated that about 8,100 tonnes (dry weight) of cement was transported to the tunnel from
Hull.
During August 1838, James Wood, the chairman of the Manchester and Leeds Railway, laid the first brick in a ceremony.
![40085 emerges from Summit Tunnel at Littleborough](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/23/40085_emerges_from_Summit_Tunnel_at_Littleborough.jpg)
The original contractors were Evans, Stewart and Copeland.
At the peak of construction, a workforce of between 800 and 1,250 men and boys was active, aided by about 100 horses and 13 stationary
steam engine
A steam engine is a heat engine that performs mechanical work using steam as its working fluid. The steam engine uses the force produced by steam pressure to push a piston back and forth inside a cylinder. This pushing force can be trans ...
s, which were used to remove material from the shafts.
The bedrock was hewn using physical strength and hand tools, illuminated only by candlelight. At an early stage of track laying, the rails were laid directly onto excavated rock, but conventional wooden
sleepers were also used.
The spoil was used for other purposes, including in the construction of
Blackpool Promenade.
Alignment of the tunnel was achieved by drilling 14 vertical shafts to provide survey points.
When the tunnel was complete, two shafts were sealed and the remaining 12 were retained as ventilation. The
ventilation shaft
In subterranean civil engineering, ventilation shafts, also known as airshafts or vent shafts, are vertical passages used in mines and tunnels to move fresh air underground, and to remove stale air.
In architecture, an airshaft is a small, ...
s were up to deep. During the tunnel's service life, No.6 was sealed after rock falls.
Progress on construction was slower than expected; the
bedrock
In geology, bedrock is solid Rock (geology), rock that lies under loose material (regolith) within the crust (geology), crust of Earth or another terrestrial planet.
Definition
Bedrock is the solid rock that underlies looser surface mater ...
and
blue shale through which it was bored proved to be harder to excavate than anticipated.
In March 1839, because of slow progress, the original contractors were dismissed and George Stephenson took over, after which the pace of work increased until a
strike
Strike may refer to:
People
* Strike (surname)
Physical confrontation or removal
*Strike (attack), attack with an inanimate object or a part of the human body intended to cause harm
*Airstrike, military strike by air forces on either a suspected ...
of the
bricklayer
A bricklayer, which is related to but different from a mason, is a craftsman and tradesman who lays bricks to construct brickwork. The terms also refer to personnel who use blocks to construct blockwork walls and other forms of masonry. ...
s occurred in March 1840.
The last brick was laid on 9 December 1840.
Summit Tunnel should have opened on
New Year's Eve
In the Gregorian calendar, New Year's Eve, also known as Old Year's Day or Saint Sylvester's Day in many countries, is the evening or the entire day of the last day of the year, on 31 December. The last day of the year is commonly referred to ...
1840; but the opening was delayed after the discovery of a defective invert, from one end which had displaced the central track drain. After repairs, the tunnel was officially opened by Sir John Frederick Sigismund Smith, the government inspector of railways on 1 March 1841. Summit Tunnel cost £251,000 and the loss of 41 lives.
The cost was far greater than the railway company expected.
The southern portal of the tunnel was grade II listed in 1986.
Incidents
![Summit Tunnel, North Portal - geograph](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/80/Summit_Tunnel%2C_North_Portal_-_geograph.org.uk_-_60363.jpg)
The tunnel closed for the first eight months of 1985 following a
fire
Fire is the rapid oxidation of a material (the fuel) in the exothermic chemical process of combustion, releasing heat, light, and various reaction Product (chemistry), products.
At a certain point in the combustion reaction, called the ignition ...
that generated sufficient heat to
vitrify
The glass–liquid transition, or glass transition, is the gradual and reversible transition in amorphous materials (or in amorphous regions within semicrystalline materials) from a hard and relatively brittle "glassy" state into a viscous or rub ...
sections of its outer brickwork.
The build up of heat in the surrounding ground led to a 'false spring'; many plants produced flowers and buds as the warm soil triggered new growth. Damage to the tunnel lining was minimal which was attributed to heated gases from the fire escaping through the
ventilation shaft
In subterranean civil engineering, ventilation shafts, also known as airshafts or vent shafts, are vertical passages used in mines and tunnels to move fresh air underground, and to remove stale air.
In architecture, an airshaft is a small, ...
s.
Restoration involved replacing of track and sleepers before it re-opened to traffic on 19 August 1985.
[“Summit Tunnel.”](_blank)
‘’engineering-timelines.com’’, Retrieved: 12 June 2018.
On 28 December 2010, a passenger train travelling from Manchester to Leeds was
derailed when it struck ice that had fallen onto the tracks from one of the ventilation shafts. The ice had built up during exceptionally cold weather and fell into the tunnel when it started to thaw. The train was the first to use the tunnel in three days as a result of a temporary break in services around
Christmas
Christmas is an annual festival commemorating Nativity of Jesus, the birth of Jesus, Jesus Christ, observed primarily on December 25 as a religious and cultural celebration among billions of people Observance of Christmas by country, around t ...
. It collided with the tunnel wall, but remained upright and no injuries were reported.
"Derailment in Summit tunnel, near Todmorden, West Yorkshire, 28 December 2010."
''Office of Rail Regulation'', 13 October 2014. Retrieved 12 June 2018.
Sources
Bibliography
*
*
Further reading
* MacDonald, M. ''The World From Rough Stones'' (1975, Random House); a novel set during the building of the Summit Tunnel.
External links
{{Tunnels in Yorkshire
Rail transport in West Yorkshire
Rail transport in Greater Manchester
Tunnels in West Yorkshire
Tunnels in Greater Manchester
Trans-Pennine Railway tunnels
Buildings and structures in the Metropolitan Borough of Rochdale
Buildings and structures in Calderdale