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COMPLETION OF THE MERSEY TUNNEL RAILWAY.

On the 11th of January (says the Liverpool Daily Post) will be opened for traffic the new station of the Mersey Tunnel Railway at the bottom of Bold Street.  With the completion of the station at Bold Street the scheme may be said to have been brought successfully to a conclusion.  It was not until 1879, after the expenditure of 125,000_l._ upon trial borings, that the promoters ventured to appeal to the public for support, and that a company, of which the Right Hon. H. Cecil Raikes, M.P., was chairman, was formed for carrying the project of the Mersey Railway into effect.  The experience of the engineers in the construction of the tunnel is not a little curious.  It was proved by the borings that the position in which the tunnel was proposed to be bored was not only the most important from the point of view of public convenience, and therefore of commercial advantage, but was from the point of view of engineering difficulty decidedly the most preferable.  In this position the cuttings passed through the sandstone rock, although on the Liverpool side the shafts were sunk through a considerable depth through “made” ground, the whole of Mann Island and the Goree being composed of earth and gravel tipped on the old bank of the river.  Indeed the miners passed through the cellars of old houses and unearthed old water pipes; excavated through a depth of tipped rubbish on which these houses had evidently been built; and then came upon the former strand of the river, beneath which was the blue silt usually found; then a stratum of bowlder clay; and finally the red sandstone rock.  Once begun, the works were pushed forward night and day, Sundays excepted, until January, 1884, when the last few feet of rock were cleared away by the boring machine, and the mayors of Liverpool and Birkenhead met in fraternal greeting beneath the river.  The operations gave employment to 3,000 men working three shifts of eight hours each, but were greatly accelerated by the use of Colonel Beaumont’s boring machine, on which disks of chilled iron are set in a strong iron bar made to revolve by means of compressed air.  This machine scooped out a tunnel 7 feet in diameter; and by successive improvements Colonel Beaumont attained a speed of 150 feet per week, leaving the old method of blasting far behind.  As the machine moved forward the rock behind was broken out to the size of the main tunnel and bricked in in short lengths.  One remarkable circumstance in connection with the work is that the boring from the Birkenhead side and the boring from Liverpool were found, when they were completed and joined, to be out of line by only 1 inch.