Queensbury Tunnel
Length 2,502 Yards. Queensbury Tunnel - Great Northern Railway
Queensbury Tunnel was one of several major engineering feats on the Halifax, Thornton and Keighley Railway, one of the so-called Queensbury Lines
The Great Northern Railway appointed John Fraser as engineer whilst his son Henry acted as resident engineer. Work on the northernmost of the construction shafts got underway in May 1874. It was originally intended that eight shafts would be sunk, however their spacing was changed at an early stage, resulting in No.7 shaft not being progressed. The contract required the tunnel to be completed within two years, but this proved impossible due to significant water ingress forcing the abandonment of two other shafts, including No.5 which would have been the deepest at 126 m (414 ft).
In July 1877, Colonel Frederick Beaumont, chairman of the Diamond Rock Boring Co, brought a rock drilling machine to Queensbury which was used to speed up the driving of headings (pilot tunnels) from the bottom of No.4 shaft. This improved the productivity of the miners by four or five-fold and resulted in the breakthrough of a continuous heading from one end of the tunnel to the other on 2 October 1877, although there was still a need to excavate the tunnel to full size and construct the lining.
Structural work on the tunnel was finished in July 1878. The last brick was inserted by the inspector, James Albrighton, who had supervised work on the tunnel from the outset.