Clay Cross Tunnel is a

tunnel A tunnel is an underground or undersea passageway. It is dug through surrounding soil, earth or rock, or laid under water, and is usually completely enclosed except for the two portals common at each end, though there may be access and ve ...

on the

Midland Main Line The Midland Main Line (MML), sometimes also spelt Midland Mainline, is a major Rail transport in Great Britain, railway line from London to Sheffield in Yorkshire via the East Midlands. It comprises the lines from London's St Pancras railway ...

line near

Clay Cross Clay Cross is a town and a civil parishes in England, civil parish in the North East Derbyshire district of Derbyshire, England. It is a former industrial and mining town, about south of Chesterfield, Derbyshire, Chesterfield. It is directly ...

Derbyshire Derbyshire ( ) is a ceremonial county in the East Midlands of England. It borders Greater Manchester, West Yorkshire, and South Yorkshire to the north, Nottinghamshire to the east, Leicestershire to the south-east, Staffordshire to the south a ...

England England is a Countries of the United Kingdom, country that is part of the United Kingdom. It is located on the island of Great Britain, of which it covers about 62%, and List of islands of England, more than 100 smaller adjacent islands. It ...

. It was the most substantial single

civil engineering Civil engineering is a regulation and licensure in engineering, professional engineering discipline that deals with the design, construction, and maintenance of the physical and naturally built environment, including public works such as roads ...

feature present on the

North Midland Railway The North Midland Railway was a railway line and Great Britain, British railway company, which opened a line from the city of Derby in Derbyshire to the city of Leeds in Yorkshire in 1840. At Derby, it connected with the Birmingham and Derby J ...

and was one of the more ambitious railway tunnels to be built during the early development of Britain's railway network. Built to a design produced by the pioneering railway engineers

George Stephenson George Stephenson (9 June 1781 – 12 August 1848) was an English civil engineer and Mechanical engineering, mechanical engineer during the Industrial Revolution. Renowned as the "Father of Railways", Stephenson was considered by the Victoria ...

and

Robert Stephenson Robert Stephenson , (honoris causa, Hon. causa) (16 October 1803 – 12 October 1859) was an English civil engineer and designer of locomotives. The only son of George Stephenson, the "Father of Railways", he built on the achievements of hi ...

, the tunnel was constructed between February 1837 and August 1839 at a total cost of £105,460. Mid-way through the tunnel's excavation, the alignment had to be changed due to previously undiscovered seams of

coal Coal is a combustible black or brownish-black sedimentary rock, formed as rock strata called coal seams. Coal is mostly carbon with variable amounts of other Chemical element, elements, chiefly hydrogen, sulfur, oxygen, and nitrogen. Coal i ...

as well as

iron Iron is a chemical element; it has symbol Fe () and atomic number 26. It is a metal that belongs to the first transition series and group 8 of the periodic table. It is, by mass, the most common element on Earth, forming much of Earth's o ...

ore; their presence led to the creation of a neighbouring

colliery Coal mining is the process of extracting coal from the ground or from a mine. Coal is valued for its energy content and since the 1880s has been widely used to generate electricity. Steel and cement industries use coal as a fuel for extra ...

and

iron works An ironworks or iron works is a building or site where iron is smelted and where heavy iron and steel products are made. Iron Works may also refer to: * Iron Works, a neighborhood in Brookfield, Connecticut * Clay City, Kentucky, known as Iron ...

by George Stephenson. Many elements of the tunnel, such as the

Grade II listed In the United Kingdom, a listed building is a structure of particular architectural or historic interest deserving of special protection. Such buildings are placed on one of the four statutory lists maintained by Historic England in England, H ...

portals, have remained unaltered since their completion.

Construction

During the late 1830s, construction of the

was underway. Seeking to avoid steep

gradient In vector calculus, the gradient of a scalar-valued differentiable function f of several variables is the vector field (or vector-valued function) \nabla f whose value at a point p gives the direction and the rate of fastest increase. The g ...

s along the line, it became apparent that a tunnel would be required near to Clay Cross. It was designed by the accomplished civil engineers

and

along with their assistant engineer Frederick Swanwick. The tunnel was originally estimated to cost £96,000 to construct. Following the completion of design work during November 1836, tenders for the work were issued by the North Midland Railway one month later. The contractors appointed for the project were Messrs. Hardy, Copeland and Cropper of Watford, who would construct the tunnel, including the

cutting Cutting is the separation or opening of a physical object, into two or more portions, through the application of an acutely directed force. Implements commonly used for wikt:cut, cutting are the knife and saw, or in medicine and science the sca ...

and excavation, for the sum of £105,400 (), and construction commenced in February 1837. The excavation of the tunnel was impacted by unexpected geological factors; both rich seams of

seams and quantities of

ore were encountered. As a result of this discovery, the alignment of the tunnel was changed. Another consequence of this discovery was George Stephenson's decision to open a

and

nearby, establishing a new company, ''George Stephenson and Co.'', subsequently renamed the Clay Cross Company, to exploit it. It would be a major local employer for the next 150 years. Construction began on 2 February 1837 when the first sod was turned for the sinking of the ventilation shaft in the centre of the tunnel. The boring of the tunnel was not straightforward, eventually costing £140,000 (equivalent to £ in ), instead of the expected £98,000 (equivalent to £ in ), with the loss of fifteen lives. The tunnel was to be wide and high with a bed of broken stone at the base deep to form the rail bed. The tunnel was to be arched completely round with brickwork laid in Roman cement deep in the roof and walls, and deep in the floor. Approximately 15 million bricks were required for the tunnel lining. The greatest depth below the surface was about . The tunnel bore was 1631m in length. A contract drawing shows the width of the tunnel bore to be 29ft at its widest point, and 25ft 11inches from the track bed to the roof of the tunnel. During August 1839, it was reported that excavation of the tunnel had been completed, and the final brick was expected to be laid within a few days. However, according to the railway historian Cliff Williams, the tunnel was not actually completed until 18 December 1839.

Description

It begins at the former Derbyshire summit of the line, also the highest point of the whole line, just after the old Stretton railway station. Situated at the watershed of the rivers

Amber Amber is fossilized tree resin. Examples of it have been appreciated for its color and natural beauty since the Neolithic times, and worked as a gemstone since antiquity."Amber" (2004). In Maxine N. Lurie and Marc Mappen (eds.) ''Encyclopedia ...

and Rother.

is directly above it and there are ventilation shafts in Market Street (around which the council have placed seats) and High Street (some above the line). The northern portal features a

Moorish The term Moor is an exonym used in European languages to designate the Muslim populations of North Africa (the Maghreb) and the Iberian Peninsula (particularly al-Andalus) during the Middle Ages. Moors are not a single, distinct or self-defi ...

-inspired aesthetic and is presently a

structure. It has castellated embattlements and a pair of tapering octagonal towers. These towers, which have sloping

ashlar Ashlar () is a cut and dressed rock (geology), stone, worked using a chisel to achieve a specific form, typically rectangular in shape. The term can also refer to a structure built from such stones. Ashlar is the finest stone masonry unit, a ...

bases, feature decoratively

arrowslit An arrowslit (often also referred to as an arrow loop, loophole or loop hole, and sometimes a balistraria) is a narrow vertical aperture in a fortification through which an archer can launch arrows or a crossbowman can launch Crossbow bolt, bolts ...

s. The portal itself ia an elliptical arch with rounded mouldings and projecting castellated parapets. It is composed of rock-faced stone and ashlar. The south portal, which is also Grade II listed, comprises an arch is formed of two ashlar bands of roll moulding profile. The portal is flanked by broad masonry

buttress A buttress is an architectural structure built against or projecting from a wall which serves to support or reinforce the wall. Buttresses are fairly common on more ancient (typically Gothic) buildings, as a means of providing support to act ...

es, beyond which are extensive masonry

retaining wall Retaining walls are relatively rigid walls used for supporting soil laterally so that it can be retained at different levels on the two sides. Retaining walls are structures designed to restrain soil to a slope that it would not naturally keep to ...

s. It is composed of squared quarry-faced Derbyshire

gritstone Gritstone or grit is a hard, coarse-grained, siliceous sandstone. This term is especially applied to such sandstones that are quarried for building material. British gritstone was used for millstones to mill flour, to grind wood into pulp for ...

with both moulded and tooled ashlar gritstone dressings. The design was similar to that of other tunnels designed by the Stephensons for the line, including the south portal of the Milford Tunnel and both portals of the Wingfield Tunnel. Clay Cross railway station was at the northern end, where the line was met by that from the

Erewash Valley The River Erewash is a river in England, a tributary of the River Trent that flows roughly southwards through Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire, forming the boundary between the two counties for much of its length. It rises near Kirkby-in-Ashf ...

. The tunnel saw one of the first uses of the absolute block signalling system, maybe after a narrow escape on the south-bound inaugural journey. The train was heavier than expected and a pilot engine was provided at the rear. This was detached at the entrance to the tunnel, but halfway through the train came to a halt, and someone had to walk back for the pilot, to the consternation of the passengers. Stephenson had been shown the system by its inventor

William Fothergill Cooke Sir William Fothergill Cooke (4 May 1806 – 25 June 1879) was an English inventor. He was, with Charles Wheatstone, the co-inventor of the Cooke-Wheatstone electrical telegraph, which was patented in May 1837. Together with John Ricardo he fo ...

supported by Wheatstone of the

Wheatstone bridge A Wheatstone bridge is an electrical circuit used to measure an unknown electrical resistance by balancing two legs of a bridge circuit, one leg of which includes the unknown component. The primary benefit of the circuit is its ability to prov ...

fame. This was the forerunner of the

Midland Railway The Midland Railway (MR) was a railway company in the United Kingdom from 1844 in rail transport, 1844. The Midland was one of the largest railway companies in Britain in the early 20th century, and the largest employer in Derby, where it had ...

's system.

References

External links

*{{gbmaprim, SK392631, Maps of Clay Cross showing the tunnel
Extract for the Accident at Clay Cross Tunnel on 29 March 1844
Grade II listed buildings in Derbyshire Railway tunnels in England Rail transport in Derbyshire Tunnels in Derbyshire History of Derbyshire Tunnels completed in 1839 Midland Railway

Construction

Description

See also

References

Further reading

External links