Short Tunnel under B7015

Image: © Ian Dodds Taken: 18 Aug 2021

A railway line used to run here from the early 1940s to the early 1960s, transporting shale mined at Mid Breich Pits nos 1 and 2, a few hundred yards North of here, to Westwood Oil Works, a few hundred yards South. The short railway line ran under the road at this point according to contemporary OS maps. The tunnel is essentially just a bricked-up bridge, with a square hole cut into one of the bricked-up ends for no obvious reason. The bottles and odd bits of rubbish must have washed in through the hole during heavy rain; nobody would come here for fun, however desperate - the rain has also washed in a great deal of sludgy mud. It is quite hard to make out in the picture - mobile phones still don't come close to proper cameras when using the flash - but there is a narrow opening after the lit-up section of wall on the right. This gives access to an identical tunnel, so presumably there were actually two tracks running between the pits and the oil works - the empties probably got sent back on a separate track. Both tunnels are around five and a half feet high and wide, and thirty-odd feet long - the other one is fully blocked off.

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