How Victorian Britain Built the Tunnel Passengers Were Too Scared to Ride Through

In June 1841, the first trains from London to Bristol plunged into nearly two miles of darkness under a Wiltshire hill. Box Tunnel was the longest railway tunnel in the world, and not everyone dared ride through it. A famous man of science was said to have warned that a runaway train would burst out of it at 120 mph, and that nobody on board would be able to breathe. Some timid passengers, so the story goes, got off and went over the hill by carriage instead. Isambard Kingdom Brunel, still in his twenties, insisted on driving the Great Western Railway dead straight through Box Hill, a tunnel his opponents in Parliament called "monstrous and extraordinary, most dangerous and impracticable". Eight shafts were sunk up to 300 feet deep, the workings flooded three winters running, and Brunel fired off furious letters to his contractors as the work fell behind. Down in the dark, up to 4,000 men and 300 horses worked night and day. Their foreman, Thomas Gale, remembered that every week the works used a ton of gunpowder and a ton of candles, and that from start to finish, a hundred men were killed. Their graves are unknown, and there is no memorial to them at Box. Using Gale's memoir, Brunel's letters and the Bath and Wiltshire newspapers, this film tells their story. We also investigate the famous legend that the rising sun shines straight through Box Tunnel on Brunel's birthday, 9 April. What the astronomers found is stranger than the myth. And we uncover what the ground around Box and Corsham was hiding a century later, from a wartime ammunition depot to a Cold War bunker. If you love the true stories of how Britain was built and the men who paid the price, subscribe to Chisel Marks and switch on notifications, so you don't miss the next film, on another job where the ground itself put up a fight. And if your family worked for the Great Western or lived in Box or Corsham, tell me their name in the comments. I read every one. #BoxTunnel #Brunel #GreatWesternRailway #VictorianBritain #BritishHistory