The Stanton Tunnel
In Colin Aldworth's book "The Nottingham and Melton Railway 1872-1990", the author remarks that very little of the original paperwork, plans, committee minutes etc have survived. Indeed for his chapter discussing the building of the line there are very sparse details of our own Stanton Tunnel. The fairly detailed plans and drawings (1) of the route which were already in existence by November 1871 show not only the chosen route from Nottingham to Melton Mowbray but also the lie of the land as all the required cuttings, embankments and tunnels are delineated, however the drawings are very generalised and give no idea of the amount of work or quantity of materials needed.
At almost the same time as the Midland Railway Company began construction of this line it was also building the Kettering to Manton Railway, which when the two lines were finished would allow express trains from Leeds, Bradford and Nottingham an alternative route to London, St Pancras. Fortunately, many more construction details have survived for the Kettering to Manton section and these have been brought together brilliantly by J.Ann Paul in her book "3000 Strangers" published by Silver Link Publishing Ltd in 2003.
Stanton Tunnel is the longest of the four tunnels between Nottingham and Melton Mowbray. In the original plans and sections submitted as part of the Private Members Bill in 1871 the tunnel length is stated by John Sydney Crossley, Engineer, to be 755 yards, which would have left an impossibly deep cutting of 70 feet at either end. Williams (2) states the tunnel to be 1100 yards long and Colin Aldworth's history of the railway gives 1330 yards. The tunnel sign at the south portal actually gives 1332 yards (1217m).
Early in 1874 a detailed survey of the route was made,
contracts were sent out for tendering and compulsory purchase of the required
land at a suggested price of £30 per mile began. John Aird & Sons of Belvedere
Road, Lambeth, London were awarded the contract which was signed by both parties
in July 1875 even though construction had started late
in 1874. By December 1875 200 yards of the tunnel had been excavated. Stanton Tunnel was completed in the first half
of 1878.
The
tunnel entrance is dated 1879. The period between the end of the construction and
November 1st 1879 when the first goods train ran, was spent ballasting and laying the permanent
way, installing the signalling and building the stations.
The North entrance to Stanton Tunnel taken shortly before electrification March 1992. The commemorative stone above the arch bears the legend "M.R. 1879". Note the entrance portal is horseshoe shaped and measures 25 feet wide and 22 feet high being similar to the Corby Tunnel entrances.
Tunnels were not constructed by
starting at one end and going through the hill to come out at the far side.
Rather, work began simultaneously at both ends and all along the proposed line of the tunnel by the sinking of shafts from the surface down to the
required depth.
During the early days of tunnel construction navvies were lowered down the shafts in a large basket from a windlass on the surface worked by a horse gin. The spoil was brought back to the surface continuously throughout the day. The horse gin used a loop of wire linked to two baskets and as one basket rose the second one was lowered. By the time our tunnel was being dug the horse gin would have been replaced by a small stationary steam engine however baskets or large buckets would still have been used.
This illustration is taken from the 1842 Report of the Children's Employment Commission.
Recent examination of the spoil around the base of the northern shaft revealed lots of clinker and small pieces of unburnt coal.
Accidents were bound to occur judging by the amount of
alcohol on sale to the work force and by the apparent ignorance of health and
safety matters. See Parish Newsletter Issue no 14 in the "Village history"
section of this web site for one poor chap who died after falling down one of
the shafts.
Once at the bottom of the shaft the tunnel would be excavated in both directions as pilot headings seven or eight feet square by teams of navvies working solely by candlelight in twelve hour shifts. The correct direction to dig being indicated by the use of a mariner's compass. When individual sections were eventually joined up they were often only a few inches out of alignment and there would be a noticeable improvement in both ventilation and drainage. True alignment was then done by suspending plumb bobs from each shaft down to the proposed track level. Any movement of the weights was damped by tubs of water. The alignment of the strings and thus the tunnel was then checked by siting the strings by eye and candle light. Once the alignment was agreed, the pilot headings would be opened out to the full tunnel dimensions and it was only after this stage that the actual tunnel lining was put in place. Construction of The Islington Tunnel, Regent's Canal. A large skip is being lowered down a brick-lined shaft that perforates the roof of the tunnel. At the far end a group of navvies are pick-axing the drive behind timber shuttering. Note the pair of temporary-way rail tracks and the flat-bed trucks. These were used to move bricks lowered down the shaft to the tunnel digging face and also to move the spoil to the base of the shaft to be hauled back up to the surface. The illustration is reproduced here by kind permission of the Islington Local History Centre.
Once at the surface, spoil from the tunnel excavation would be put into tipping
trucks that ran on a temporary rail-line.
The tipping trucks might have been
pulled by horses. The illustration is taken from
"Our Iron Roads", by F. S. Williams and
shows horse tipping as done on the London to Birmingham Railway in in the 1830s. It is more likely that
the tipping trucks were pulled along by a small steam
engine. There is an excellent photograph
of such an operation taken in the 1890s during the construction of the Great Central Line
in the book by Dick Sullivan
(3). As one walks along the track of the tunnel at the
rear of the houses along the Melton Road, the pattern of the tipped spoil is
neither uniform nor continuous, but rather shows swellings and hollows in its
deposition. If a proper survey was done it would be possible to work out where the tracks for the tipping trucks ran. The rise on the Melton Road is made of
boulder clay which was
left behind at the end of the last ice age and forms most of the spoil. At the centre of the tunnel at the
lowest levels the drive went through Liassic deposits and careful searching of
the spoil heaps will reveal the odd piece of Lias limestone.
On the Kettering to Manton Section it is recorded that there were 120 horses, 56 portable and stationary steam engines varying from 6 to 20 horsepower together with 17 locomotives on the works. Colin Aldworth records that on the Nottingham and Melton Mowbray line at its busiest there were 210 horses and 45 stationary engines being used. Temporary rail tracks were used everywhere to move huge quantities of bricks, lime, cement, timber, spoil and ballast besides the iron rails. The volume of spoil alone from the tunnel and shafts totalled approximately 20,000 cubic yards of material.
The Corby Tunnel at 1925 yards (1760m) is longer than the Stanton Tunnel and was dug from 10 shafts approximately 175 yards (160m) apart along the ground surface. After the tunnel was completed four of the shafts were lined with bricks up to the surface to act as ventilation shafts to allow fresh air in and the smoke of the steam trains to escape. The six remaining shafts were actually filled in.
The Stanton Tunnel has three brick lined air shafts; one, the least frequently seen, is to the south of Browns Lane and the other two are familiar to Stanton villagers who walk along the path that runs along the route of the tunnel north of Browns Lane behind the houses fronting Melton Road.
The most northerly of the three air shafts sited along the Stanton Tunnel. The brick-laying is notably more ornate than that to be seen on the air shafts on the Kettering to Manton section of the Midland Railway. Note the protective metal cage over the top to prevent the ingress of foreign objects. Remnants of a previous generation of metal cages can still be found discarded on the sides of the spoil heaps at the shafts at both ends of the tunnel.
We do not know if further construction shafts were sunk and have been filled in, but this seems highly likely. The distance between the north entrance of the tunnel and the first air shaft is 850 feet (259m) then there is a gap of 1060 feet (323m) to the next air shaft. The gap between the second shaft and the one to the south of Browns Lane is again 1060 feet (323m) followed by a further 850 feet (259m) to the southern tunnel entrance. There must be at least two further filled in shafts and possibly another two as well. The circumference of the base of the brick work around the shafts is 36 feet (11m) which produces by calculation a diameter of 11 feet 6 inches or 3.5m.
The original plans and sections drawn up in November 1871 to illustrate the Private Members Bill "The Nottingham to Rushton Lines Act" (1) may be viewed at the Notts Archives. This shows the maximum depth of the shafts to occur at the central shaft nearest to Browns Lane. The section shows a depth of 79 feet from tunnel floor to the field level. To this, the depth of the spoil heaps and the brickwork around the air shafts must be added in. The tunnel depth from the top of the masonry to track level was recently measured at the northern end shaft and found to be 101 feet 8 inches or 31 metres. The Stanton Tunnel is thus considered to be quite a shallow tunnel. The next tunnel down the line at Grimston was dug from 5 shafts, the deepest being 200 feet (61m) and on other lines, shafts up to 200 metres deep had to be dug. A previous owner of the "Railway House" which is built along the line of the tunnel is quoted as saying that "On frosty nights all the door knobs all round the house rattled as the express trains went through the tunnel below."
A scene showing a deep cutting being made as the line emerges from a tunnel. A similar scene would have been observed at both ends of the Stanton Tunnel. Two horses are pulling wagons of spoil from the tunnel along the temporary way, whilst navvies are filling another series of wagons as the wall of the cutting is widened. This lithograph was done by A.Picken from an original drawing by S C Brees in 1837 for "Railway Practice" and shows the mouth of the North Church Tunnel on the London to Birmingham Railway and is reproduced here by kind permission of the Manchester Central Library & Information Service.
The brick lining of the Corby Tunnel had a thickness varying from 27 to 36 inches (0.7 to 0.9m) and used 20 million bricks in its construction, most of which were made close to the tunnel. We know from a Coroners Inquest (4) held in Stanton into the death of Benjamin Webb, who tragically died from multiple injuries sustained when he became trapped in a brick making machine, that bricks for the tunnel and air shaft linings were made on site. The number of bricks used in the construction is not recorded. We do know that the tunnel lining is 7 bricks thick from a cross sectional plan of the tunnel that still exists and is in private hands. It can be "guestimated" at around 12 million by comparison with the Corby Tunnel.
The temporary brick-yards set up along the Kettering to Manton sister line were all close to where the bricks were going to be used, e.g.. close to the various tunnels and to the Welland Viaduct. Each brick yard made 100,000 bricks a week. It is not known for sure where the bricks for the Stanton Tunnel were actually made. There are no surface remains of brick works or kilns within the village of Stanton, however this is not surprising. When construction of the line and the tunnel commenced in late 1874 there were no houses along Browns Lane from its junction with the Melton Road until Browns Farm (now Laurel Farm) close to the parish church. Similarly there were no houses at all on the Melton Road apart from just four cottages known as the Stanton Odd Houses that were clustered around the lane leading up to Hill Farm. If brick making machinery and the associated kilns were located along the Melton Road or the east end of Browns Lane then the spate of house building that occurred after the turn of the 20th century would have removed all traces of the works. It is known that bricks were being made close to the line of the railway between Keyworth and Plumtree but the date of the start of these operations is not known; the site is now built over as Plumtree Park.
Some of the bricks on the outer course of the northernmost air shaft have apparently weathered badly. A patch half way up the 15 feet high stack have been carefully cut out and replaced by modern bricks bearing the legend "Accrington" impressed into the frog. The original bricks are still scattered around on the slopes of the spoil heap and have been examined. They are frogless and bear no identification marks of any kind, as indeed one might expect if they were made on site. The bricks measure 8¾ x 4½ x 3 inches. The air shafts have 41 courses of common bricks visible above the surface of the ground, followed by 7 courses of blue engineering bricks, topped by a ring of curved dressed masonry coping stones that measure 36inches long x 7½inches deep x y inches across. The middle shaft brickwork and masonry looks to be in quite good condition.
The third air
shaft at the south end of the tunnel is in a
relatively bad state.
Whilst the brick work is mainly OK there are patches of
exploded bricks where damp and frost has penetrated. Hawthorn seed has been
deposited by birds around the masonry top. This has germinated and grown away
into small bushes forcing the masonry blocks apart in several places. The
responsible body for these shafts is aware of the problem as strong galvanised
wire has been looped around the top rows of bricks to hold them in place.
In 1893 the express trains using the Stanton Tunnel from Nottingham to London, St Pancras took 2 hours and 40 minutes. For a picture of a train in the tunnel and for a selection of trains using the line please see the excellent web site at www.old-dalby.com/Plumtree.htm and www.old-dalby.com/Widmerpool.htm
References and suggested further reading:
1) Notts Archives DPR 109 Deposited plans and Sections for the Nottingham & Rushton Lines Act, Midland Railway Nov 1871
2) "The Midland Railway, Rise and Progress" by F.S.Williams, 5th Edition 1968, David & Charles
3) "Navvyman" by Dick Sullivan 1983, Coracle Books
4) The Nottingham and Midland Counties Daily Express, Monday 31st July 1876
5) "The Railway Navvies" by T.Coleman 1965, Hutchinson & Co.
6) "Our Iron roads" by F.S.Williams 1852
7)"British Railway Tunnels" by Alan Blower 1964, Ian Allan, London