Tunnel Vision

Considering the time of day - 9.30 on a beautiful summer Thursday morning - it was a miracle in itself that there was little or no traffic on the roads or indeed inside the toll tunnel connecting Liverpool to Birkenhead.

As he drove through, Paul was grateful to lay aside his sunglasses and escape for a few brief minutes the bright glare which tended to give him slight, constant headaches during hours of daylight all summer long.

Not for the first time, he speculated as he drove on the inescapable fact that , although there was almost forty years difference in their respective construction dates, the interiors of the two tunnels under the Mersey were virtually indistinguishable. The combination of natural weathering and exhaust fumes had aged the tiles of the ‘new' tunnel to Wallasey prematurely, and they appeared identical to the older tiles in the Birkenhead tunnel.

It happened as he approached a gentle left-hand curve at the lowest point of the tunnel, just where a driver could sense that he was about to start climbing the slope towards Liverpool.

A grey Nissan Micra, travelling considerably in excess of the 30 mph limit for tunnel traffic, hurtled around the bend ahead of him. Fortunately there was no traffic in his mirrors. Before he could react it had slewed across all four lanes, perhaps as much as 60 metres in front of him, and disappeared without trace through the solid side wall of the tunnel in the approximate direction of New Brighton (or possibly Ireland).

A swift visual check confirmed that there were still no other cars in his mirrors, or ahead of him. This meant that there were unlikely to be other witnesses to confirm or deny what his eyes insisted he had just seen. On reflection, he was not even sure he was too bothered about this: he wasn't exactly keen to have it confirmed that he had just seen something happen which was patently impossible. Cars definitely do not disappear through solid walls without leaving a trace of their passage ..........

Not being pushed for time, Paul decided on a whim to park up in the Pay & Display bays outside the Central Library in William Brown Street, scant metres from the Tunnel exit.

He needed a coffee while he thought about what he'd just experienced, and there was also the opportunity to dig up whatever was recorded in Internet files concerning the construction history of the first of the two tunnels beneath the Mersey.

An hour later, he had some answers, but a lot more questions than he'd started with.

Records showed that a total of 17 ‘navvies' (or ‘navigators') had lost their lives in the eight years it had taken to build the tunnel, which at the time was the longest in the world.

The date - July 7^th - was not an ‘anniversary' of any of the accidents, and the time of day didn't seem to have any significance either. The most significant consideration, however, was quite simply the fact that in 1934, the Nissan Micra was most definitely not available in Liverpool or anywhere else!

How to resolve this problem, he thought as he doodled on the notes he'd made while surfing all the sources he could think of in the hour allotted by the public computers.

Had any other tunnels been planned, proposed, even started, he wondered.

A quick inquiry indicated that if he was prepared to wait, he could have a ‘second bite at the PC cherry' in about 20 minutes. He should just have time to take a swift peek in Liverpool's historical records, now he could pinpoint a specific period of years .....

Not being an artist, architect or draughtsman by profession, he was unable to make much sense of the sketched plans he dug up, but even to an amateur it was blindingly obvious that the final shape and route of the tunnel had been dictated in part by the architect's intent, but had been influenced  more than once under way by a combination of the engineering equipment and knowledge of the Thirties, and also by unexpected encounters with extremely dense, difficult-to-drill strata of rock which had turned them from their desired route. Checking depth figures, he realised that one such deviation had occurred at the tunnel's deepest point, just where he had had his "close encounter".

There appeared to be a rough sketch - perhaps more detailed than many others he'd glanced at - indicating that somebody had at least thought about excavating in the direction the phantom car had taken.

Peering closely at the scribbled signature on the microfiche document, he decided it was probably "F. Dyson" - not the name of the Tunnel's eventual Chief Architect, but certainly a familiar name locally, having been responsible for a significant number of major buildings on Merseyside.

With a little more information at his fingertips he returned to do battle with the available Internet records when his turn came around.........