Catesby Tunnel in the early 1980s

A place that fascinated me, ever since I borrowed Main Line Lament - a classic first published in 1973, about the final years of the Great Central Railway - from the public library in Earlsdon, Coventry, in 1977. Here's the front cover:

It is essentially this shot, taken by me in June 1980. Looking at new imagery on Google Earth, it seems the first bridge north of the tunnel has been demolished.

The Great Central ran down to London (Marylebone) from Sheffield via Nottingham, Leicester and Rugby. The stretch between Rugby and Quainton Road - where it met the London Underground - fascinated me the most. I've written before about John Betjeman's Metro-Land, his televisual poem about the Metropolitan's (the world's oldest underground railway) further reaches. Catesby Tunnel is an extension of that mythology - a sparsely populated corner of rural England of profound beauty that once resounded to the steam whistle as trains hurtled down the track towards London. Thundering into the tunnel, the second-longest in England at 2.7km (2,997 yards), those Edwardian expresses would have represented the cutting edge of technology a hundred years ago.

Below: the north portal, bearing the tunnel's date of construction. The line was closed in 1966 as part of the Beeching Cuts.

Below: a longer view with telephoto lens. Not a photo that you could capture today. Back in the early 1980s, health and safety was not what it currently is; people could just wander into disused tunnels. 

It was wet; much of its floor was under water, there are deep manholes running along its length, along with other traps to the unwary. I made several passages into the tunnel, though only one all the way through, with two members of the Warwick University caving club, who joined me in June 1980 to pass through the entire length; all of us were equipped with wetsuit trousers, helmets and lamps. Stalactites, calcite deposits, late-Victorian workmanship. Most amazing were the permanent-way workers' cabins. One was huge - the height of the tunnel itself, large enough for to host a large dinner party!

There are several air-shafts poking up through the hill, all visible on Google Earth. Sadly, access to the North Portal has been all but cut off to casual walkers, as Eddie and I discovered last summer when we visited Catesby.

Below: view from the top of the North Portal, looking towards Rugby, many miles away. "And quite where Rugby Central is/Does only Rugby know/We watched the empty platform wait/And sadly saw it go," observed John Betjeman in Great Central, a poem written just before the evil Dr Beeching ripped up the tracks here in 1966.

Coincidence corner (we know full well that the universe is held together by a web of coincidence)... Among the condolence messages I got after my mother's death was one from Richard, who was at Warwick University with me. In his e-mail, he mentioned a trip we made to the Catesby Tunnel. The following day, while clearing out stuff in my mother's bedroom, I came across some colour slides I took in the early 1980s. Four rolls of film - lo and behold, one of them included snaps from this very trip to Catesby. Summer 1982, I guess, as I moved into my own house in November 1982.

All the photos, apart from the book cover, are scans from that roll of film. Using my PlusTek 35mm film scanner, I've had to do a fair amount of manual removal of dust and scratches in Photoshop. The graininess of the Kodak Ektachrome 200 becomes visible under high magnification. Camera? Leica M2 with 35mm f2 Summicron lens (which I still have. Will sell. Big bucks.)

Below: Richard explores the boundaries of Existentialist Silliness. Behind him the North Portal; though it is visible a tiny spot of light (click to enlarge) - that's the South Portal at Charwelton. The tunnel is as straight as a poker.

Below: Richard emerges from a manhole into a drainage culvert that ran between the tracks. In the tunnel, the culvert was filled to the brim with water.

Below: The Infinite Shining Heavens. A post-punk quartet? My brother Marek (centre, background) and Richard's future wife Clare looking bored in the red jumper. A platelayers' bothy towards the Catesby Viaduct, to the north of the tunnel.

The Catesby Tunnel looks likely to be put to new use - as a wind tunnel for testing the aerodynamic resistance of racing cars. I'd rather it be turned back to use as a railway tunnel for a line from Rugby down to Quainton Road, or just as a footpath/cyclepath, like the Snoqualmie tunnel in Oregon. At least it will not be filled in.

FURTHER COINCIDENCE: It's now 2021. The tunnel is indeed being turned into a wind tunnel. And the concrete contractor chosen to carry out the screeding and concrete pumping on the project is Burton Concrete Pumping, the company belonging to Richard and Clare's two sons, Peter and Patrick.

These photos, courtesy of Burton Concrete Pumping, show the tunnel in the process of transformation into an all-weather test track, where cars (passenger cars as well as racing cars) can be aerodynamically tested at speed in a controlled environment, the tunnel being long enough for cars to reach 100mph. 

Below: a new asphalt surface for the tunnel floor.

Below: and so, 123 years after its opening, 55 years after its closing, the tunnel is being put back into use.

If you are interested in the history - and the future - of the Catesby Tunnel, Rail Engineer shot a short video in September 2020 - worth a look!

Finally, links to my three short stories set around this magical part of England; read them here, here and here. Set in 1921, 1912 and 1960, respectively.

This time two years ago:
Crumbling King Coal, Katowice

This time three years ago:
Street cries of Old Poland

This time four years ago:
The gorgeousness of Warsaw at dusk

This time five years ago:
I'm so glad I'm living in Warsaw

This time six years ago:
Candid photography

This time seven years ago:
Archival photos of Jeziorki's Rampa in action

This time eight years ago:
Red sky in the morning...