Tunnel vision

Rarely a day goes by without me passing a railway tunnel.

More often than not, it’s the little one in St Annes (Bristol, this is, for you non Bristolians) or the Sea Mills end of Clifton Down Tunnel.

This might seem an odd thing to write about but then I am (insert your own joke here).

And I have obsessed with railway tunnels since I was a small boy, when I should really have been playing the silver ball.

It started with St Annes where once stood a small railway station. (Younger readers should ask their elders as to what a small railway station was.)

There were advantages to the tunnel lovers like me (are there any others?) because I could stand at the tunnel end and be very near it.

The trains, hauled by diesels, thundered along from Bristol Temple Meads on their way to London, or roared out of the tunnel itself towards Temple Meads.

I found it utterly captivating.  It was a huge size, large enough for two trains on top of each other, as are many of the tunnels built by Brunel.  Even in those days, I wondered at the ingenuity and grit of the Victorian navies for building it with minimal tools.

And if I ignored the signs to leave the platform and advance to the entrance of the tunnel, which was only a couple of hundred yards long, and I could see the far more daunting and considerably longer Foxes Wood Tunnel glowering in the near distance.

I was utterly fascinated with and captivated by the longer, darker tunnel.  I felt excitement and fear at the same time.

Foolishly, we walked through the small tunnel one day to get a closer look at the big tunnel.  On the left was a river, on the right a steep wooded area, curving to the right the two lines slipped into the blackness of the tunnel.  Fear overtook excitement, especially as a large express tore out of it, its locomotive blurting out an angry ‘toot’ at us.

Somehow we summoned the courage to walk back through the little tunnel, crossed the lines (I know, I know: it was bloody stupid but my excuse is that we were bloody stupid) and walked home through the woods, rather than walking back to the platform.  After all, those pesky police might have been patrolling.  My mum would have killed me.

I needed more tunnels so my friends and I cycled to Severn Beach which although sounding vaguely glamorous was anything but.

A rickety fair and an open air pool from which the owners removed the flies before anyone was allowed to swim and a grim housing estate bereft of any charm whatsoever (which is how it remains today).

But we didn’t want anything but the Severn Tunnel.

Another Brunel build, this tunnel plunged below the River Severn and for four and a half miles gave you a lot of noise and darkness.  Today all I wanted to see was the tunnel entrance.

These were innocent times and there was little to stop the irresponsible and idiotic child climbing down the steps to the tunnel itself.

Massively tall, it was blacker and bleaker than any tunnel I had seen before and we felt the need to walk a few steps into the darkness.

The first thing I became aware of was the drip-drip-drip from the water that, well, drips into the tunnel and the next was the distant sound of a train, the hissing of the rails followed by the Vroom of the engine which got louder very quickly and there was barely enough time for us to scramble onto the bank.

You would think that this was a passing phase, one I would dump before reaching my twenties but no, it carried on.

I drove to places like Box tunnel and Chipping Sodbury just to look at tunnel entrances.  I agonise every time I pass the Sea Mills entrance to Clifton Down Tunnel when the foliage by the road has obscured my view.  

When we went to see Ribblehead last year for me to achieve a lifelong ambition and standing next to the epic viaduct, I forced the family to trudge miles past the viaduct itself so I could see the entrance to Blea Moor tunnel.

It’s mad, I know, and in middle age it’s not getting better.

It’s better than railway line gradients, I suppose, because that’s my other railway hobby, obsessing on steep railway lines like the famous Lickey Incline near Birmingham (this was in 2012, so ages ago, obviously), Shap Summit in Cumbria (we were on a hike across the Lake District but took a 30 mile detour so I could see it), various embankments in Devon and, most pitifully, a train ride to Exeter to see a very steep hill and nothing else.

I’m sure people have other hobbies that are just as bad, like plane and train spotting but without actually taking numbers (oh wait a minute, that’s me too), but few so difficult to explain to a sane world.

Remind me I wrote this when I next criticise someone else for having a stupid hobby.