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Tunnels are unique, complex and often highly important infrastructure projects typically designed to meet the utility or transportation needs of a particular area.
As they are complex to construct, requiring well-maintained machinery, cautious planning and conveyor belts to help in vast earthmoving procedures, they tend to be designed to last for a very long time, if not forever.
However, this often begs the question of what should be done with road and rail tunnels once they stop being used for transportation.
This often fierce debate has seen a flashpoint with the Queensbury Tunnel, a 1.4-mile tunnel in the Pennines between Halifax and Bradford.
Its controversial abandonment and the even more contentious £7.5m bill that would be required to concrete it up and make it inaccessible forever have brought this question to the forefront.
To understand why, we need to know why it was abandoned, what the alternative is and whether this tunnel repair work would be more cost-effective in the long term.
The longest Great Northern Railway tunnel, when it was made in 1878, the Queensbury Tunnel was intended to link Halifax, Bradford and Kingley in West Yorkshire.
It was a remarkably difficult project and relied heavily on a rock drilling machine. Whilst it was regularly used for freight trains for the better part of a half century, it consistently struggled to form the backbone of a West Yorkshire passenger railway and would be subject to frequent repairs due to flood damage.
Eventually, as the recession following the Second World War meant that even the freight trains stopped travelling through, the decision was made to close the tunnel entirely in 1956.
From then on until 2025, it was in a state of limbo, slowly decaying further and suffering dangerous collapses due to its particular vulnerability to floods and the end of a maintenance regime that helped to mitigate this.
Starting in 2009, plans have been drafted to officially abandon the tunnels, filling them in enough to make them safe and letting nature take its course and gradually collapse them.
This work involves filling the open shafts with aggregate and supporting the shafts underneath to avoid a significant collapse that could risk nearby buildings, such as an electricity substation.
The plans to essentially permanently close the tunnel have not been received well by the local community, as well as broader industrial heritage groups, who have argued that a feat of engineering with such a remarkable history should not be left to rot.
The most specific of these is the Queensbury Tunnel Society, which has strongly advocated for the abandonment plan and its £7.5m cost to be thrown out, with the money instead used to convert the tunnel into a major part of a walking and cycle route between Halifax and Bradford.
This approach has been used countless times on a smaller scale to preserve disused railway lines and tunnels and has proven remarkably popular as a tourist attraction in its own right.
Much like small-scale heritage railways running steam trains, there is a sense of adventure that comes from exploring old tunnels, and Queensbury would become England’s longest reused railway tunnel, bringing with it considerable interest.
The unique history of the tunnel would also be a selling point, and the cycling charity Sustrans concluded that the route would generate £3 of overall benefits (factoring not only economic but also social and the side effects of increased tourism) for every £1 spent.
The biggest concern with many of these proposals, particularly the ones that advocate for a similar budget as simply abandoning it, is whether restoring the tunnel is even possible at this point.
As a report published by Bradford Council notes soberly, the tunnel is nearly constantly flooded, there have been multiple tunnel collapses with additional deterioration expected, and it is difficult to even ascertain and survey how much work needs to be done, let alone publish a detailed feasibility study.
It is not necessarily impossible to repair, but it is somewhat risky, and the cost could fluctuate from slightly above the price of filling it in to nearly ten times the cost.
However, the counterargument is that even a more significant price would eventually pay for itself in terms of its wider benefits, whilst abandoning it is a permanent move that costs millions and by design offers no benefit.
Unfortunately, time is running out for saving the tunnel, as once the abandonment works begin, the die is cast, and there is no going back.
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