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Fall Asleep with Frank — Beneath the Hill: A Quiet History of Penmanshiel Tunnel
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
Tonight, Frank tells the gentle, unhurried story of Penmanshiel Tunnel — a sealed railway passage in the Scottish Borders that carried trains between Edinburgh and London for over a century. A slow, calming sleep story for a quiet night.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
There is a hill in the Scottish Borders, not far from a small place called Grantshouse, in Berwickshire. And beneath that hill, sealed now and silent, is a railway tunnel that was once part of one of the great routes of British rail travel.
The tunnel's first serious encounter with misfortune came from water, not from anything mechanical or human. On the twelfth of August, nineteen forty-eight, the rain fell heavily across the area.
Less than a year later, there was fire. On the evening of the twenty-third of June, nineteen forty-nine, an express passenger train was making its way from Edinburgh to King's Cross in London.
Penmanshiel Tunnel's final chapter begins in the winter of nineteen seventy-nine. By that point, freight traffic had changed.
British Rail's first instinct was to repair the tunnel and reopen it. But once the full extent of the collapse was understood, that idea was abandoned.
The hill has been slowly reclaiming the ground ever since. The southern portal of the tunnel has been covered over by the hillside itself.
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