Brockville Tunnel

The Brockville Railway Tunnel, also called the Brockville Tunnel, is a former railway tunnel located beneath the downtown of Brockville, Ontario, Canada. It is the first railway tunnel built in Canada; construction began in September 1854 and the first train passed through the tunnel on December 31, 1860. Since 2017 it has been opened to the public as a free seasonal tourist attraction. The tunnel runs north from Water Street to Pearl Street, a distance of 527 metres (1, 729 ft). It passes underneath what is now Brockville City Hall, built in 1863–64 as the Victoria Hall. It was built by the Brockville and Ottawa Railway (B&OR). The tunnel was designed to provide a railway link from the timber trade of the Ottawa Valley to the Brockville port facilities on the St. Lawrence River. The B&OR, incorporated in 1853, ran from Brockville, through Smiths Falls, to Sand Point, near Arnprior, with a branch line from Smiths Falls to Perth. Its first B&OR train left Brockville on January 25, 1859, almost two years before finances permitted completion of the tunnel. The B&OR amalgamated in 1878 with the Canada Central Railway, which was absorbed in 1881 by the Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR). The railway through the tunnel was later used by special height-shortened steam engines, and then diesel trains into the mid-1970s. The rails and ties were then sold and removed in the 1980s, and the ra

Tunnel data from Wikidata (CC0). Summary from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA).