Jeremy Clarkson TV - Fred Dibnah TV - Mark Williams TV - The Fifteen Billion Pound Railway TV - Ronald Top TV - The Tube: An Underground History TV - Porridge Christmas Special 1975 - Ripley’s Believe It Or Not! 2006 - Seth Shostak - Tim Wallace-Murphy - The World’s Most Extreme Tunnels TV - America’s Book of Secrets TV - Night on Film: An A-Z of the Dark TV - Spies Beneath Berlin TV – Stuart Pearce – The Venice/Simplon Orient Express TV - Secrets of the Underground TV - Rob Bell TV - The Reich Underground TV - Hitler’s Secret Tunnels TV - The Channel Tunnel: Life on the Inside TV - Dan Jones: Building Britain’s Canals TV - The Curse of Oak Island TV - Drug Lords TV - Yes, Prime Minister TV - The Colditz Story 1954 - Diana: The Witness in the Tunnel TV - Great Escapes with Morgan Freeman TV - London Underground Revealed TV - The Five Billion Pound Super Sewer TV - Kingpin TV - The UnXplained with William Shatner TV - Tony Robinson TV - Seconds from Disaster TV -
He proposed a tunnel: two miles long ... He built this exquisite, elaborate and very expensive facade but inside it was unlined ... The opening of the Box Tunnel meant a straight and level run from London to Bristol in four hours, thirteen hours faster than the mail coach. Jeremy Clarkson, Great Britons: Brunel, BBC 2002
It took six years to build this tunnel under atrocious conditions ... Cut and cover – where they dig a great tunnel through the hillside and then put in the centring ... Lay the masonry which had all been cut to shape ... Cover the whole lot up ... Withdraw the wedges from underneath the centring ... And keep advancing like that ... A beautiful stone arch tunnel. Fred Dibnah’s Building of Britain: Building the Canals, BBC 2002
Brindley had some serious problems to overcome ... It was an extraordinary feat of engineering. And it took great courage and huge bravado to even conceive of doing this: the newspapers called it the Eighth Wonder of the World ... His extraordinary tunnel is now disused. Mark Williams: Industrial Revelations e3: Clocking On, Discovery 2002
Because he’d already set the dimensions of the tunnel at seven feet wide all boats now on this system are the dimensions of this working boat, about seventy by seven, a ratio of ten to one: a narrow-boat. ibid.
Box Hill. Couldn’t go over it. Had to go through it ... He [Brunel] was going to drive two seven-foot broad-gauge lines through this hill. This is Box Tunnel – at nearly two miles long it was the greatest railway tunnel ever attempted, and an infamous piece of engineering if ever there was one. Mark Williams on the Rails: Brunel, Discovery 2004
Over a hundred men lost their lives, and many many more were seriously injured and maimed. ibid.
Tunnelling under the Thames has been a Great British obsession for many years. The Fifteen Billion Pound Railway II, BBC 2014
No-one had ever built a tunnel for a canal before. It was nicknamed Le Mal-Pas (the bad step). Ronald Top, Industrial Revelations s3e2: The European Story: The Canal King, Discovery 2005
The first underground lines were built just under the surface using a technique called Cut & Cover. The Tube: An Underground History, BBC 2013
The Greathead Shield was the tunnelling machine pioneered by Brunel that made it possible to dig through the clay deep under London. ibid.
Tommy Slocombe’s tunnelling ... That tunnel spells disaster to us all. Porridge Christmas Special 1975: No Way Out, Fletch, BBC 1975
They dug another tunnel and put the earth down there. ibid. Fletch to MacKay
After six months of digging a secret tunnel from Saltillo Prison, Mexico, 75 convicts made their daring bid for freedom, only to find that their tunnel emerged in the nearby courtroom where many of them had been sentenced. The surprised judges quickly sent them back to jail. Ripley’s Believe It Or Not! 2006
If you could drive straight down, into a tunnel bored through the crust of the planet, you’d hit this molten mess in about an hour. It’s called the asthenosphere – a sluggish sea, several hundred miles thick, on which floats the Earth’s cool epidermis – the so-called tectonic plates. Seth Shostak
The tunnels were re-excavated at the end of the nineteenth, the beginning of the twentieth century, by Lieutenant Warren of the Royal Engineers. And he found Templar artefacts scattered about throughout the tunnels. Tim Wallace-Murphy
They spent nine years tunnelling through solid rock, and then a series of radiating tunnels underneath. What they discovered down there has been a matter of intense speculation ever since. Tim Wallace-Murphy
10) Lefortovo Tunnel Moscow: three crashes every day ... The world’s craziest tunnel. The World’s Most Extreme Tunnels, Channel 4 2015
9) 2nd Avenue Subway Tunnel: Under New York and Manhattan.
8) War tunnels of Vietnam.
7) Survival bunker in Kansas: Five-star living in nuclear missile silo.
6) Shanghai’s psychedelic tunnel: World’s weirdest.
5) Guoliang: China's hand-built tunnel through a mountain.
4) Afghanistan’s tunnel built by Soviets.
3) Tunnels through Swiss Alps
2) Tokyo’s storm drains.
1) Mexico’s drug-smuggling tunnels.
Secret passages, Arizona, 14th February 2014: Federal authorities confiscate forty-six pounds of marijuana and a half-pound of heroin inside a small home along the US/Mexico border ... A four hundred and eighty-one foot drug-smuggling tunnel. America’s Book of Secrets: Secret Underground, H2 2014
Underground smuggling tunnels discovered along the US border. ibid.
Some of the big gang boys. Look at them. Hah. All done no good on last week’s pools so they’re back to heaving dirty big rails about in the tunnel. Yes – while you’re pressing the mattress there’s me and 1,119 others hard at it down the hole. Night on Film: An A-Z of the Dark, BBC 2011
Into the cavernous blackness of the twisting tunnels between the rails that link station to station, office to home, the Fluffers march each midnight ... Like glow-worms, night by night the Fluffers was behind the years of London’s tube trains. Yes, these are the Fluffers. People of another world, who see the sunshine only for a fleeting hour one day. ibid.
This operation took place in Cold War Berlin ... After sixty years the CIA has finally declassified its files ... The secret construction of a five-hundred-metre spy tunnel. Spies Beneath Berlin, Quest 2015
The British were also partners in this tunnel ... The year is 1952: West Berlin is an island in a communist sea. East and West are squaring up over the barbed wire. Berlin had become a city of spies. ibid.
The Soviets already know what they are up to. ibid.
I can see the carrot at the end of the tunnel. Stuart Pearce, 1992 football commentary
The Simplon tunnel is over twelve miles long, and is in fact the longest railway tunnel in the world. The Venice-Simplon Orient Express I, Movies4men
Deep beneath America’s most notorious prison a recent discovery is revealing old rumours of secret tunnel systems. Secrets of the Underground s1e1, Discovery 2017
Over the decades there were at least 14 separate escape attempts by at least 36 different inmates. ibid.
In a major city riddled with underground passageways could a shadow government be planning the end of days? I’ll deploy advanced sonic technology to see through the walls under Denver. And in Ohio, mystery shrouds an ancient mound shaped like a serpent. Secrets of the Underground s1e2
Denver: some believe this idyllic metropolis is hiding an enormous secret … a secret network of tunnels. ibid.
The peculiar symbols scattered throughout the terminal … Exhibit A: a series of giant murals … which appears to portray the Apocalypse. ibid.
So there’s still a debate about who built the mound and why. ibid.
In the heart of Kentucky Bourbon country below one of Louisville’s elite hotels lies a series of forgotten tunnels: was this the secret escape route of notorious gangster Al Capone? Secrets of the Underground s1e3
One of the greatest ever feats of engineering – this tunnel under the Thames. Rob Bell, Brunel: The Man Who Built Britain, Channel 5 2017
Box Hill: The longest tunnel in the world … In the blasting of Box Tunnel Brunel’s men went through a ton of candles and a ton of gunpowder every single week. ibid.
This tunnel under the River Thames is where Isambard Kingdom Brunel cut his engineering teeth. Rob Bell, Brunel’s Britain s1e1: Master of Bridges, Channel 5 2018
The tunnelling shield is still the basic principle that is used on all modern tunnelling projects. ibid.