As opposed to my last couple of blogs, which talked of scandal and crime, and mild incest, this is a nice chilled one about a railway tunnel in a small town, hidden away by vegetation. It looks pretty cool now, somewhat like a fairy kingdom if all the fairies were Jeremy Kyle guests. The rails are all gone, and if it wasn't for the tunnel itself there would be barely indication the railway was ever here at all.
It's strange to think that there was a time when all this would have been quite exciting to the locals. In the 1800s, nobody had cars, and these small rural communities were very much isolated from the rest of the world. When the whole railway thing really started to catch on, people were suddenly connected like never before. It's something we don't really think about now that transport is so widely available.
This tunnel was proposed in 1874, as a joint effort by the large London and North Western company, and the much smaller Merthyr and Brecon Railway, often nicknamed Murder and Breakneck Railway by the locals because every few months throughout the 1870s and 1880s somebody died in a horrific accident.
Faced with looming competition from a larger company with a smaller body count, Murder & Breakneck decided to collaborate with London & North Western on plotting the train lines entry into the town, which resulted in boring this tunnel through a hill. The tunnel officially opened in 1879, and all of the important folks who had made it happen posed in front of the entrance for a group shot.
(Photo not mine, obviously)
Allegedly the plaque above the entrance still exists, but is obscured by foliage.
I can't help but feel sorry for these guys. Included in the shot, no doubt, is the foreman William Jenkinson, who oversaw the entire tedious process. The drills they used bored through rock at a rate of nineteen inches in ten minutes. An hours work rewarded nine feet of progress, in a tunnel that was to be a 1040 yards long. The fact that such things still stand, structurally intact, over a century later really goes to show how much skill and effort went into them. They have every reason to be proud.
So it's kinda unfortunate that this is the way it ended up. All that hard work and fantastic engineering had a pretty pitiful legacy. The train service held three services each way on week days and four on Saturdays, but it ran a substantial loss for most of its lifetime and as such, it was among the first of many lines that closed in the latter half of the 20th Century. The last train allegedly came through here on the 28th January 1958.
(Photo not mine, obviously)
This probably isn't a picture of the last train, but it is a train coming out of this exact tunnel, and that is cool.
(Photo not mine, obviously)
Likewise, so is this picture taken from a train in 1922. It doesn't quite line up with the tracks because there's actually another line splitting off from this one.
There's another picture taken from the top of the tunnel entrance that shows it.
(Photo not mine, obviously)
I'm pretty happy that there's so many vintage photos of this place, seeing as the tracks and signal posts are all long gone.
Traversing rubble and litter to get across the swamp was pretty fun. There's a shopping trolley doing a great impression of that horse from the Neverending Story.
And here we have the entrance of the tunnel. Allegedly it was blocked up shortly after its closure, but that doesn't quite make sense. From what the locals say, people have used this as a shortcut for decades, with some of the older residents claiming they did so in the 1960s and 1970s, and many claiming that it should be open to the public as an official cycle path.
Allegedly the tunnel wall had a gap about the size of a regular door, but then people came with sledgehammers at some point in the 1990s to make the hole bigger. The council responded by blocking the new entrances with big fucking rocks, which seems like a half-assed effort, seeing as all anyone needs to get around this obstruction is a functioning set of limbs. But these rocks do serve a purpose. If they weren't there, this hole would be large enough to drive a car through, which is precisely what the folks with the sledgehammers intended.
The tunnel is pretty cool. I have a soft spot for railway tunnels, and I find it pretty fascinating that all this engineering and construction still holds up to this day, over a hundred years since it was built.
The exact length of the tunnel is 1040 yards, although it's frequently incorrectly referred to as a mile long. At its deepest, it's eighty feet underground, and to expedite the construction, huge vertical shafts were sunk into the ground. They're still there to this day, meaning it could be possible to abseil into the tunnel too.
But what really makes it interesting is all the stolen cars.
I was initially frustrated by the presence of the cars down here, because the locals talk about it like it's the most ordinary thing in the world. Everyone knows they're down here, but nobody seems to question it. That simply isn't enough for me. I must know the story.
Most of the vehicles are now in bits.
Various other chunks of car wreckage are just strewn across the tunnel.
I was determined to find the story behind the cars, and actually ended up talking to one of the folks who brought them here nearly thirty years ago, promising him anonymity for information. He said that it was a bit like "Gone in 60 Seconds," a movie I haven't seen but assume is about car theft.
According to him, in 1995 he and his friends got some sledgehammers and bashed a hole in the tunnel wall big enough to squeeze a car through, and then they regularly stole cars, took them down here, stripped them down to just a shell, make a bit of dosh from all the parts, and then left the shells behind to be set on fire by another group of people. Allegedly at its peak, they had about fifteen cars hidden down here.
Amazingly they were never caught, which initially baffled me because it's a small town. Surely a spree of car thefts would not go unnoticed. But my contact told me that they stole them from further away, never locally. That makes a lot more sense.
One of the ceiling shafts, shining a spotlight down onto the floor of the tunnel.
Interestingly the chap who was in charge of sinking these shafts during construction was caught stealing two waistcoats off someones washing line. He ended up with 21 days imprisonment with hard labour. So really the tunnel had its connections to theft from the very beginning.
Whereas the line itself was so notorious for accidents that even the local papers in 1874 said that it was seemingly fated for misfortune.
I did hear a rumour of an accident taking place in the tunnel in 1880, but I haven't found any hard evidence. However with a series of railway accidents at the hands of Murder & Breakneck Railways, it doesn't shock me.
By far the most devastating crash came in 1874 when a train going uphill somehow came uncoupled from its trucks loaded with coal. The trucks then plummeted back down the tracks, eventually reaching about 40mph, slamming into a passenger train that was waiting at the station, obliterating several coaches and sending the locomotive itself flying through the buffers and onto the street, where it took a four foot chunk out of a hotel. Miraculously, only one person died.
Okay, so for her it wasn't that miraculous.
But 52 people escaped with minor injuries and a few people needed to have their legs amputated. It could have been much worse.
That didn't happen in this tunnel, but it did happen at the local station so it does kinda tie into the history somewhat.
This Cavalier is by far the best preserved car in the entire tunnel. I do wonder if it could be restored. I wonder if its former owner even knows it's here.
Fuck knows what model this one was.
Towards the end of the tunnel, there are five "ribs" that took all of my energy to resist climbing on.
This was allegedly installed to support the tunnel lining, but I have no idea why it's just in this section of the tunnel and not more widespread.
Here we are at the end of the tunnel. It was a bit of a scramble to get to, what with it being a bit of a pond sprinkled with stepping-stones about as stable as a boomer at a non-binary meetup. But I made it!
This is particularly interesting because it looks like when the original wall went up, they still kept a door in it. It seems that when it was forced open by the gang, they bashed a hole around the door. The boulder, however, seems to be blocking the door. It's a bit of a weird set up. If the door wasn't there, could a car fit through here? Was a door fixed across the hole after it was smashed, to stop cars getting in? I just don't know.
This side does look a little more like a fairy kingdom. It even has a couple of trees growing out of the top of the entrance archway. It's really pretty.
So at some point, the powers-that-be got wind of all the car thefts, and instead of making any effort to actually catch the perpetrators, they just put big fucking rocks in the way to make it impossible to get cars in. It's a bit of a half-arsed deterrent. Sort of like the car theft equivalent of telling a woman to dress more modestly. It doesn't solve the problem. It just makes it go somewhere else.
To conclude, as far as urbex goes this one is perfect for beginners. You can walk your dog though this tunnel if you really want. They might enjoy it. The chap I spoke to who was part of the car-stealing gang told me that they regularly had sex down here too, so that's apparently an option for any lovebirds out there. If you're alone, you can walk through it naked, because it's so dark nobody will notice. I did walk it naked, but nobody was around to test that theory.
Anyway!!! On that note, that's all I've got. My next blog is a Victorian lido, which is very pretty. And then I'm looking at an abandoned theatre. In the meantime, people always say things like "I miss your blogs. Why don't you do blogs anymore?" And I still do blogs, you fools, you just don't see them because social media is an algorithmic hellscape that won't show people the things that they follow. But anyway, try your luck! Follow me on Instagram, Vero, Reddit, Twitter and Facebook. Maybe you won't miss my blogs. Good luck.
Thanks for reading!
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