Exploring Nottingham's Forgotten UNDERGROUND | Secret Entrance Found

To kick start my Underground Nottingham series we have a real adventure! We have to find the secret manhole that takes us down into the underbelly of the City.

Sherwood Rise Tunnel.
Opened: 1898.
Closed: 1968

Many of the tunnels of nottingham were built by three railway companies in and around Nottingham, because their lines crossed substantial hills.
The companies were the Great Northern Railway (GNR), the Great Central Railway (GCR), and the Nottingham Suburban Railway.
The Great Central Railway main line from London Marylebone to Sheffield via Leicester and Nottingham was the last trunk route to be completed in 1898 and the first to close in 1968.
The first coal trains ran between London and Sheffield in 1898, and passenger travel followed in March 1899.
After passing through a deep cutting in the sandstone south of New Basford station, southbound trains entered the Sherwood Rise Tunnel.
Which measured an impressive 665 Yards in length with a maximum depth of 120 feet from surface to rail level.
Sherwood Rise Tunnel is constructed with a blue brick lined roof covered heavily in soot, making the tunnel itself appear very dark and great at absorbing the light we threw at it. The sidewalls are mostly cut directly through the Sandstone, however there is sections of the side walls also constructed with brick.
Some refuges are cut out completely in the sandstone with a brick arch above.. Whilst others are solely all brick construction.
There is a couple of considerably larger refuges which we assume will have served as plate layer huts.
There are no air shafts.
The Tunnel is generally in amazing condition, not bulges or collapses apparent.. And is a really dry tunnel for the most part.. There is a small amount of water ingress towards the southern portal (Carrington Station end).
We found a few quite interesting relics inside aside from your usual cable carrying hooks (which there was plenty of present),
We found a signal bracket now on the floor, which after reading the only post I can find online from 1994 it appears it was back then attached to the wall with the signal intact.

Due to being such a built up city nowadays and so many groundwork changes made along the former GCR mainline it is a very hard line to follow today.
The blocking of the railway track bed at three locations, successively in the 1960s, late 1980s and late 2000s, means that a direct route, wide and high enough for a double track railway and therefore feasible as a light railway if not a roadway, lies utterly unusable beneath the congested streets.
At the time of the Beeching cuts, planners and railway managers clearly believed that the Victorian infrastructure they inherited would never be needed again.

#nottingham #underground #adventure