Civil Engineering heritage: Scotland - Lowlands and Borders
Date 2007
Event ID 590499
Category Descriptive Accounts
Type Publication Account
Permalink http://canmore.org.uk/event/590499
This tunnel built from 1844–47 on the main railway north, the Edinburgh, Leith & Granton Railway (from 1847 the Edinburgh, Perth & Dundee), was used for only two decades before being closed on 22 May 1868. It is 3210 ft long on a gradient of 1 in 27, built mainly in brickwork, and is 26 ft wide with an elliptical arched roof 18 ft high in the centre. In-bound trains were hauled up the incline through the tunnel to the company’s Canal Street terminus at Waverley Bridge Station by means of a stationary steam-operated winding engine – a system that was inconvenient and expensive to operate and was closed down six years after being acquired by the North British Railway. The tunnel was designed by Grainger, with George Buchanan superintending the works for the City’s interest. The resident engineer, who devised ingenious temporary works and prepared a longitudinal section showing the strata, was William Paterson. The contractors were Ross & Mitchell.
For about 20 years after its closure, until the 1920s, the tunnel was used for growing mushrooms on both sides of one line of track on which a North British locomotive operated. Almost the full length of tunnel was used and there were three miles of mushroom beds consisting of 3000 tons of soil and manure. Mushrooms that had been growing in the tunnel three hours earlier were delivered
to Glasgow by 10am daily.
R Paxton and J Shipway 2007
Reproduced from 'Civil Engineering heritage: Scotland - Lowlands and Borders' with kind permission of Thomas Telford Publishers.
