Blea Moor Tunnel


Blea Moor Tunnel is a railway tunnel located between Ribblehead Viaduct and Dent railway station in England. It is the longest tunnel on the Settle-Carlisle Line, being almost twice as long as the second longest tunnel, Rise Hill Tunnel.

History

Built by the Midland Railway, it took more than four years to complete. Construction started in 1872, with dynamite transported from Carlisle and Newcastle in carts to the construction site. The wages on offer to the miners who dug the tunnel were 5s to 5s 6d per day.
It was completed in 1875 at a cost of £109,000.
It passes some 500 feet below the moor after which it was named, and was built with the aid of seven separate construction shafts sunk from the moor above. This permitted sixteen separate gangs of workers to be used during construction. Four of these were subsequently filled in but three were retained for ventilation purposes and are still used as such today. At one point of the track's history, steam locomotives were tested for their worthiness by driving them through this tunnel.
The line from the south enters the tunnel on a rising 1% gradient, but an initial summit is reached at the 1100 ft contour just under half a mile from the southern portal. From there, the rest of the tunnel is on a shallow descending gradient of 1 in 440 towards Dent Head.
In April 1952 a passenger train derailed shortly after exiting the tunnel due to a broken brake rod on the locomotive tender fouling the points. The use of rolling stock with Buckeye couplings and welded underframes was praised in preventing telescoping of the coaches and thus there were no deaths.

Traffic

Any train that goes the full length of the Settle & Carlisle line goes through the Blea Moor Tunnel. This includes passenger trains, all run by Northern, various special excursions and the many goods trains. A short distance south of the tunnel is Blea Moor Sidings signal box, which supervises the line through the tunnel and also over the adjacent Ribblehead viaduct. Since 2016, the goods loop there has also been used several times a day by stone trains from the quarries at Arcow and Horton to reverse direction before returning south via Settle and Hellifield to various stone distribution terminals in the Leeds, Manchester and Liverpool areas.

Train simulators

You can go through the Blea Moor Tunnel either with Microsoft Train Simulator, Trainz Classics 3 or Train Simulator Classic.

Location

  • Southern portal:
  • Northern portal: