imagine if you will traveling into that railway tunnel just there and the train
breaking down midway now imagine opening the doors for your escape and stepping out
into a canal imagine that tunnel being split into two imagine a mortar being
fired into that tunnel it's got quite a lot of history all that and more in this week's
video and also thank you to pouch that's made this video possible and more on that later
so this is high on railway station it was built in february 1845 now it stands just to the north west
of these two tunnels Higham and Strood tunnels now not only did they used to be one tunnel but
they were also built 20 years before the railway track was even laid here how was that possible
so let's take ourselves back to 1800 so canal mania
was in full swing railways hadn't quite got there just yet so the thames and medway
canal company was born with the goal of trying to connect their namesake the thames up that way
and the medway inlet just down there now much of the the west end of that still remains today
and of course there's quite a lot of abandoned bits too which has certainly seen better days
progress on the canal was very slow despite this 1800 act largely because they couldn't
decide upon a route now for a canal that was supposed to be only six seven miles long
that seems like a really strange thing you'd think but they had an issue which was this a
not insignificant chalk ridge between higham and strood now if you're only building a six or seven
mile canal you don't want to be blowing a large proportion of your budget on digging a tunnel
through that but as the years progressed and more and more acts were introduced a tunnel was more
and more likely and by 1824 the fifth and final act saw this canal open and of course included
that tunnel a 4012 yard dead straight tunnel now its dead straight alignment was not unique but
what was unique at least as far as i can tell is that it wasn't lined with anything at all
they deemed that the chalk they board through was strong enough that no brick was required
this also gave the tunnel an incredible amount of light especially as it was dead straight
so all is well we have a canal tunnel we have a 20 foot wide canal tunnel with a six foot tow
path so what could possibly go wrong well unfortunately traffic could only travel in
one direction it couldn't pass within the tunnel and therefore the tunnel became a
bottleneck for the canal almost immediately traffic flow had to be strictly timed and of
course if you missed your time slot you could be waiting at one end for hours
within a few years in fact within a decade they decided that a solution was required
traffic on the canal was very poor so would this new approach work so i have a hole in my bag
like the nursery rhyme what i've got a hole in my bag dear liza dear lizer that's bucket
it's not it is bag it's bucket anyway anyway anyway luckily i have already downloaded the
free desktop browser extension pouch we've used pouch a lot we'd have over the last couple of
years and we've talked about pouch before for good reason pouch automatically pops up and applies the
best discount codes while you're shopping so a new bucket bag was required so we popped onto
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you and in this instance it saved us a whopping 10 percent so i can carry on carrying things in my
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so halfway down the tunnel the geography of the land allowed them to sort of dig it out if you
will and open out the tunnel this was a hundred and fifty yard section and it allowed the boats
to pass each other in what was effectively the center of the tunnel but of course now there's
two and you have high-end tunnel and strood tunnel so now you know the era you probably
know what's coming next 1844 and the graves end and rochester railway and canal company was born
and they wanted to lay a track along pretty much the same route which was great until they got to
the tunnel so when they got to the tunnel they decided that they had a tow paw for that was a
perfect trap bed if there ever was but of course that hung over the canal so they had to place
stilts into the canal to pop this new track on it so if you can imagine they now have a railway and
a canal in the same tunnel now that's as curious of mishmash of victorian invention i've ever seen
so don't forget the tunnel at this stage isn't lined so what do you do while the board of trade
decided to test it they would fire a few blank mortars at the lining as you do amazingly it
stood up to these tests and all they advised with a couple of places could do with some brick lining
now for the next two or three years this bizarre practice of having
both trains and canal barges share the tunnel continued
and the locals were of course fascinated by this and they kept on opening the doors of the trains
as it went into the tunnel subsequently the doors would break and fly off and injure people
so the only way to get around this was of course to lock the doors on the walling side and this
of course meant that if the train were to break down in the tunnel you'd have to get out on the
canal side and subsequently step into the canal this stopped a few years later when south eastern
railway obtained an act to take over the the line completely they double tracked it they dug
out the canal took the water out and of course it's now in the condition that it remains today
right thanks for watching this week's video folks we will see you next sunday 5 p.m as usual