His first operation was of course to endeavour by the power of steam-engines—the comrades of his life—to lower the water with which he had to contend; and although, to a certain degree, this attempt succeeded, yet by the draining of remote springs, and by the sinking of the water in wells at considerable distances, it was soon ascertained that the quicksand in question covered several square miles.
The tunnel, 30 feet high by 30 feet broad, arched at the top as well as the bottom, was formed of bricks laid in cement, and the bricklayers were progressing in “lengths” averaging 12 feet, when those who were nearest the quicksand, on driving into the roof, were suddenly almost overwhelmed by a deluge of water which burst in upon them. As it was evident that no time was to be lost, a gang of workmen, protected by the extreme power of the engines, were with their materials placed on a raft; and while, with the utmost celerity, they were completing the walls of that short length, the water, in spite of every effort to keep it down, rose with such rapidity, that at the conclusion of the work the men were so near being jammed against the roof, that the assistant-engineer, Mr. Charles Lean, in charge of the party, jumped overboard, and then, swimming with a rope in his mouth, he towed the raft to the foot of the nearest working shaft, through which he and his men were safely lifted up into daylight, or, as it is termed by miners, “to grass.”
The water now rose in the shaft, and as it is called “drowned out” the works. For a considerable time all the pumping apparatus appeared to be insufficient. Indeed the effort threatened to be so hopeless that the Directors of the Company almost determined to abandon it, but the engineer-in-chief, relying on the power of his engines, prayed for one fortnight more; before that period expired Science triumphed over her subterranean foe, and—thanks to the inventors of the steam-engine—the water gradually lowered.
By the main strength of 1250 men, 200 horses, and 13 steam-engines, not only was the work gradually completed, but during night and day, for eight months, the astonishing and almost incredible quantity of 1800 gallons per minute from the quicksand alone was raised by Mr. Robert Stephenson and conducted away!!
Indeed such is the eagerness with which workmen in such cases proceed, that, on a comrade being one day killed at their side by falling down the shaft, they merely, like sailors in action, chucked his body out of the way and then instantly proceeded with their work. In the construction of the tunnel there were lost twenty-six men, two or three of whom were “navvies,” killed in trying, “for fun,”—as they termed it—to jump one after another across the summits of the shafts.
The time occupied from the laying of the first brick to the completion of the work was thirty months. The number of bricks used was 36,000,000, sufficient to make a good footpath from London to Aberdeen (missing the Forth) a yard broad!
On the completion of this great work the large populous village which had been constructed on its summit was of course suddenly deserted; it has since completely disappeared, and, instead of the busy scenes it once witnessed, there is now nothing heard on the dreary summit of the Kilsby Tunnel but the desolate moan of the rumbling train, or the occasional subterranean whistle of its engine; these noises being followed by the appearance of a slight smoke slowly meandering upwards from the two great shafts of the tunnel.
During the operations we have just described, an artificer who had been working in the tunnel was ascending one of the shafts when, the back of his coat happening to get into an angular crevice of the partition, called by miners a “brattice,” which separated the shaft from the pumps, it became so completely jammed therein that the man was obliged to let go the rope, and accordingly, while dangling over his head it rose to the surface, he remained, to the utter astonishment and dismay of his comrades, suspended about 100 feet from the bottom, until some of them descended and rescued him by cutting away the imprisoned piece of his coat, which, on being afterwards extricated, was long preserved in the engineer’s office as a trophy demonstrating the strength of good honest English broadcloth.
At the same shaft an accident of exactly a contrary nature subsequently occurred. In order to execute some trifling repair to the brattice, there was, during a desperate cold night, suspended, about half-way down the shaft, a temporary scaffolding on which several artificers were working by candle-light, when all of a sudden a well-known powerful “navvy,” named Jack Pierson, fell from the surface with such momentum, that, breaking through the frail scaffolding as if it had been tinder, he was in a few seconds heard to go souse into the water at a considerable depth beneath!
As soon as the men on the scaffold had recovered from their surprise they naturally all at once were animated with a desire to save their comrade. One lustily roared out for rope; another vociferously proposed something else; while several navvies, bawling from the surface, were each as eagerly and as loudly prescribing his own remedy. In the midst of this confusion the stentorian voice of Jack Pierson himself was heard, from the very bottom of the pit, calmly to exclaim,