International Day Against Homophobia, Transphobia and Biphobia

May 17, 2026

https://cupe.ca/events/international-day-against-homophobia-transphobia-and-biphobia

#May17 #InternationalDayAgainstHomophobiaTransphobiaAndBiphobia

🇳🇴 May 17th – Constitution Day!

https://www.steinerskolen-norge.no/display/edecf743-836a-0980-5593-169350202339

The thread about the building of the Scotland Street tunnel, a challenging – and occasionally fatal – engineering endeavour

This thread was originally written and published in September 2023.

In this thread from the other day I covered why Bellevue House in the centre of Drummond Place was demolished so as to allow the Scotland Street Tunnel to run directly beneath it. There’s a lot been written about the Tunnel: some of it’s even true! Despite a service life of just over 20 years and despite being defunct as a transport route for over 150 years, it still captivates the local imagination. The 1,052 yard long tunnel climbs from its entrance beneath Scotland Street to its terminus at the long gone “Canal Street Station” (beneath the Waverley Market) at a significant gradient of 1-in-27, directly beneath the axis of the New Town streets of Scotland Street, Dublin Street and St. Andrew Street so as not to undermine any buildings. But have you ever stopped to wonder how it was built?

The tunnel was planned by the Edinburgh, Leith & Newhaven Railway, which soon changed its name to the Edinburgh, Leith & Granton when the terminus on the Forth shifted to the latter harbour. Within a few years, this small railway was absorbed by the larger (but as-yet unbuilt) Edinburgh & Northern Railway in and changed its name one last time to the Edinburgh, Perth & Dundee in 1849 to better reflect the destinations it planned to connect.

When it came to construction, it wasn’t simply a case of starting at one end and digging towards the other, or even trying to meet in the middle from both. No, in fact they dug from both ends and also sunk 5 shafts along the route and dug out from all, at once. The process was to dig a narrow guide mine or drift , 6 x 6 feet wide and tall, linking all the shafts together and then widen that out into the 24 x 24 feet tunnel section and line it. The aerial view below shows the locations of these shafts, from the southern edge of St. Andrew Square (top right of image) to the southern edge of the Drummond Place garden (bottom left of image).

The shafts are not spaced equidistant along the route but are concentrated in the central section between Drummond Place and St. Andrew Square. This is because of the underlying geology; the hardest rocks to dig through are located here. From the northern portal and under Scotland Street to the north of Drummond Place was easy going through sand, clay and gravel but beyond this they struck multiple bands of sandstone, freestone, hard freestone, very hard freestone, whinstone, hard sandstone and blaes (mudstone and shale). Beyond St. Andrew square, going got easier again as the freestone is interspersed with multiple bands of clay. An excellent geological section map is available on Canmore, but the terms of its licensing don’t allow me to reproduce it here. So I went one better and re-drew it and re-coloured it to make it clearer for you.

The sources tell you the tunnel was constructed between 1844-47, but the newspapers confirm that the drift was actually started by the contractor James Mitchell (of Ross & Mitchell, who was father in law to James Gowans of Rockville) in February 1843 when the company was still known as the Edinburgh, Leith & Newhaven Railway. It was largely completed by February 1844, with the exception of the hardest section beneath Drummond Place and Abercromby Place. Much of the ground that was cut through here was water bearing and drainage was a problem before the whole drift was completed. A particular difficulty, which you can see in the above diagram, was the strata being cut through were thrusting upwards at an angle of around 20-30 degrees to the tunnel and so formed “walls” which held back the water. When the miners breached these, they could suddenly and unexpectedly release the water built up in the next layer. To counter this, the contractors bored out “jumper holes” (pilot holes) ahead of the excavations. When the jumper hole breached a geological wall and struck water, this could then be tapped off and drained away in a controlled manner before the whole drift advanced into the next strata.

This approach was quite successful, but disaster struck early on Friday 29th November 1844 when the nightshift workmen of No. 3 Shaft, digging away below the vicinity of Albany Place, bored out the jumper hole off the planned angle in error and breached a significant subterranean pocket of water which flooded the workings. This shouldn’t actually have been a surprise, the Thursday shift had noticed unusual springs of water in the workings and one of the miners had insisted to his mates that they were digging off of the intended route. Mr Mitchell, the contracting engineer, was informed, and made known his intention to go down with the morning shift at 6AM, to inspect the workings for himself. He asked the workmen to call him before they went down, however when the shift arrived they workmen called not on Mr Mitchell the engineer, but his brother Peter Mitchell, who was employed as a superintendent “but was not conversant in the business of mining“.

Instead of getting his brother, Peter Mitchell took it upon himself to do the inspection and went down with the gang. A short time later, a 14 year old boy – Jack – was being lowered into the shaft and was almost at the bottom when he heard “a loud roar of thunder” and yelled in a panic to be hauled back to the surface. Jack only just made it to the surface before a “huge wave came surging up the shaft” behind him and rose to a height of 80 feet, before “falling back again… almost as quickly as it had risen“. A second explosion of water occurred near the entrance to Broughton Markets out of No. 4 shaft, this one caused by the compression of the air in the tunnel by the flooding finding a route out and propelling the water before it. The basements in this area were flooded up to a depth of 4 feet. Once the initial torrents had subsided, the men at the surface found the drift and shafts were flooded and choked up with rocks, clay and debris from the onrush of water. The majority of the water however drained down and out of the tunnel mouth at Scotland Street “where it flooded the terminus of the completed portion of the railway to a considerable extent“: for a short period, the Canonmills Loch resurrected itself.

The men on the surface soon followed the receding water down the shaft to look for their mates. A ganger – Erskine – and a miner, Blair from Liberton – were soon found, “as might be expected, quite dead“. The body of another miner – Philips – would not be recovered until later. Tragically, he and Blair should not have even been there, their relief had overslept and were still putting their working clothes on on the surface when the disaster happened. Philips wife “resorted to the scene in the course of the forenoon and her wild shrieks and cries exhibited a spectacle to touch the coldest heart“. His body was found at around 3PM that day and that of Peter Mitchell, who should never have gone down the mine, was found at 4PM. Their bodies had been washed down the tunnel and were stopped beneath Drummond Place by a barrier of rock that had been left across the drift to help control the flow of water down the hill.

A public subscription was raised for the “families of all these poor men” who (with the exception of Mitchell the superintendent) would be “left destitute” by the loss of the breadwinner. The Edinburgh Evening Courant implored the directors of the railway to contribute generously.

The tunnel was finally completed and ready in mid-April 1847, when the company was known as the Edinburgh, Leith & Granton Railway. Captain Coddington, RE of the Railway Board inspected it and gave it the all clear on 10th April. It opened on Monday 17th May after “the most formidable difficulties“, on the same day as the Edinburgh & Glasgow Railway opened their extension from Haymarket to a (for now temporary) terminus underneath the new Waverley Bridge.

A watercolour painting by Joseph Ebsworth was completed a couple of months later, and from its vantage point of the Scott Monument we can clearly see a train emerging from the Scotland Street tunnel into Canal Street Station below Princes Street. There is a further thread here about that station, if you fancy reading some more on the Edinburgh, Leith & Granton Railway. The tunnel was too steep for the railway engines of the day when it was built, so trains were hauled up it on a rope by a static winding engine and ran downhill by gravity from Canal Street to Scotland Street, were a locomotive was attached for the onward journey to Granton or Leith.

Despite the effort of its construction, the tunnel ended up having a very short life and was closed to traffic only 21 years after it opened. You can read more about the various crimes and illicit goings on that the tunnel attracted during this time in this thread. In this time it also gained a reputation for accidents and the newspapers record many – it proved particularly dangerous for the men employed to work it:

• In December 1853, Thomas Cleghorn, a railway guard, was killed instantly in the tunnel when he struck his head on the wall after leaning out of the luggage van in which he was riding.
• In August 1855, a carriage left unattended at the top of the tunnel and without its brakes applied, ran down the incline and collided with a passenger train, causing multiple injuries, some severe. The shunter, Thomas Wells, pleaded guilty to “culpable neglect of duty” and was imprisoned for 9 months.
• In September 1857, a goods train emerging from the foot of the tunnel at Scotland Street did not stop and ran into the back of a slow-moving coal train. The driver of the latter train jumped from his engine but forgot to shut off the steam and apply the brakes in his panic. His engine ran off towards Granton at a speed of 30mph and crashed into a train of carriages which was fortunately almost empty, demolishing the lot. The few passengers on board had already jumped clear when the runaway train was seen to be approaching. The Glasgow Sentinel newspaper recorded that at Scotland Street station the damage was limited to 2 barrels of whisky, which broke and their “mountain dew scattered on the ground“
• In October 1859, John Adam, a railway labourer, was fatally injured after being struck by a train coming out of the tunnel. He had gone to fetch a lamp to work with and found himself caught between the train and the tunnel wall.
• In October 1859 also, the haulage cable snapped at 930AM in the morning, preventing use of the tunnel for the whole day.
• In June 1863, James Samuel, a carriage driver employed to move coaches around Canal Street Station by horse traction, caught his foot in the mechanism of a turntable and was run over by a train coming out of the tunnel on the haulage rope. His injuries proved fatal.
• In July 1865, a train of 13 carriages, 2 trucks and 3 brake wagons was moving downhill when it separated into two portions. The forward portion moved ahead, but was then hit by the rear portion when it began to slow as the brakemen, in the pitch dark, could not even see that the train had separated. There were no serious injuries.
• In September 1867, a train ran away down the hill from Canal Street Station and overshot the station at Scotland Street at the foot of the tunnel, the brakemen – one on every third carriage – had to resort to applying the emergency “drags”, stout pieces of timber that were shoved into the spokes of the wheels to bring them to an immediate (and violent) stop. There were no serious injuries.
• In November 1867, William Reid, a brakeman, was killed when he jumped from his train at the foot of the tunnel and fell, being run over by his own vehicle.

Ultimately, the tunnel was never a practical transport solution. Beyond its lack of engine traction, the platforms at Canal Street station were far too short to allow longer trains, and were at 90 degrees to the larger Edinburgh & Glasgow and North British Railway station, making connections clumsy and impractical. In 1863 the line’s then owners, the North British Railway, gained powers to construct a new line diverting around the tunnel via Abbeyhill. Construction began in 1865 and it opened (and the tunnel closed) on May 22nd, 1868. It has been abandoned as a transport corridor ever since, but has seen use variously as a car garage, industrial mushroom farm, air raid shelter and emergency railway control room for at least some the intervening years. Every so often a plan is mooted to re-open either as a tram or metro route, or as a cycleway.

Footnote. In February 2023, the Broughton Spurtle local newspaper broke the story that Dublin Street was subsiding – a “sinkhole” hole had appeared in the middle of the road. Coincidentally, this was right on top of No. 4 shaft, the one that flooded Broughton Markets in the 1844 disaster.

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May 17

This day in history:

• 1760 – French forces besieging Quebec retreat after the Royal Navy arrives to relieve the British garrison.
• 1914 – The Protocol of Corfu is signed, recognising full autonomy to Northern Epirus under nominal Albanian sovereignty.
• 1590 – Anne of Denmark is crowned Queen of Scotland.
• 1967 – Six-Day War: President Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt demands dismantling of the peace-keeping UN Emergency Force in Egypt.

Births:

• 1836 – Virginie Loveling, Belgian author and poet (d. 1923)
• 1873 – Henri Barbusse, French author and journalist (d. 1935)
• 1961 – Justin King, English businessman

Deaths:

• 2017 – Todor Veselinović, Serbian football player and manager (b. 1930)
• 1521 – Edward Stafford, 3rd Duke of Buckingham, Welsh politician, Lord High Constable of England (b. 1478)
• 2012 – Donna Summer, American singer-songwriter (b. 1948)

Holidays:

• Children's Day (Norway)
• Constitution Day (Nauru)
• Navy Day (Argentina)

Random Article of the day:

Mahesh Shinde

In times of crisis and discrimination, our communities are our strength and power.

Today we celebrate love, pride, resistance, and the power of communities. Across the world, LGBTQIA+ communities and allies are coming together in powerful ways, showing courage, and building collective strength in the face of hate.

We're proud to organize and resist alongside LGBTQIA+ organizations, activists, and everyone fighting for a world where we can all live freely and authentically. 🌈

Because equality isn't optional and solidarity is everything. 💪🏼 ❤️ 🌎

#LoveIsLove #May17 #IDAHOBIT #StandUp #TakeAStand #NoMoreHate #LGBT+ #QueerHorror #bookstodon #books #HorrorWriter #HorrorAuthor #HorrorReader #IndieAuthor #IndieHorror #SupportIndieHorror #HorrorCommunity #DavidRider

More info: https://may17.org/

Happy Constitution Day to all my wonderful followers and clients in Norway – may your May 17th be filled with joy, pride, and celebration today! 🇳🇴

#ConstitutionDay #Norway #May17 #Celebration #Pride #Joy​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​