Talk:Summit Tunnel fire

A fact from Summit Tunnel fire appeared on Wikipedia's Main Page in the Did you know column on 21 July 2004. The text of the entry was as follows:

Did you know... that the 1984 Summit tunnel fire in England may have been the biggest underground fire in transportation history?

A record of the entry may be seen at Wikipedia:Recent additions/2004/July.

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Untitled[edit]

What have been described as "blast relief shafts" were actually intended to be smoke ventilation shafts for steam locomotives. They were sunk to depth at the start of the tunnel construction and this meant the tunnel could be bored from 26 faces--one at each end and the others from the ventilation shafts. The tunnel is on a gradient falling towards Littleborough and the danger from petrol in the River Roch affected Littleborough rather than Todmorden. After it re-opened in August 1985, the first train to use it was a petrol train.

—The preceding comment is by anonymous user 86.133.79.253. It was added to the main article on 30 March 2006 at 18:16 and was moved to this talk page by Ecb 18:20, 2 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Response to the above comments, in turn[edit]

Hmm. The definition of "blast relief shaft" on this page is a bit ambiguous and that's my fault. I have unambigously defined what the blast relief shafts were on the Summit Tunnel page—I described them as blast relief shafts to vent steam from the locomotives that passed through (exactly as the anonymous comment above says). But I didn't bother to define them again in Summit tunnel fire page. So, anyone reading nothing but the fire page is free to assume that Robert Stephenson provided them because he foresaw there'd be a need to vent flames from highly flammable cargo in 1984. I'll amend this.

There were actually fourteen shafts sunk. Two were so short (or so close together) that they didn't bother to leave them open for induced draught. So in all, there were 30 working faces on the tunnel. If we add this data (and I don't think we should) it ought to be added to Summit Tunnel, not Summit tunnel fire.

In terms of gradients, the tunnel doesn't always fall towards Littleborough. The alignment rises up to a crest about 11.5 chains (230m) in from the north (Todmorden) portal, after which it drops down to Littleborough. Nonetheless, the details of which areas were evacuated (Todmorden, Summit and Littleborough) is contradictory so some clarification (with references!) would be welcome. Until then, I say we should leave it as it is.

I can well believe that the first train to use the tunnel after it reopened was a petrol train, as that matches British Rail's sense of humour. But we should only mention it as an apocryphal tale unless we get some firm evidence for it.

Ecb 19:44, 2 April 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Which Stephenson?[edit]

According to the article, 'At a public house in Todmorden, The Masons Arms there is a small collection of photographs noting the fire, along with the statistics of the construction, with a quotation by Stephenson, the tunnel's builder who said " I stake my reputation and my head that the tunnel will never fail so as to injure any human life"'. Impressive quote. Was it Robert Stephenson or George Stephenson, or another one entirely? I think it might be an idea to link to the engineer who said it but I'm not sure who it was. There's also nothing at Summit Tunnel to identify who it was. mh. 00:51, 18 January 2007 (UTC)

It was George Stephenson, according to the HMRI report (Railway accident: report on the... see the third reference on the article page for a full citation). Ecb 14:05, 21 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Copyvio restored[edit]

I've restored the suspected {{copypaste}} notice. Freshly written material specifically for Wikipedia tends to rarely contain the phrase "at the location shown in Figure 1" and "Figures 2 and 3". If this was indeed written for WP, then a simple slight rewrite/edit to move the highlighted sentence to the imagebox description and describe the point of interest using words can be made. —Sladen (talk) 15:40, 18 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I've taken it off again. I've done a bit of digging in the page history, and the following links to old versions of the page show that the suspicious references to figure numbers are innocent:

The first version of the page lacked photographs, and the text had no references to figure numbers.
Photos were added in November 2004 with figure numbers in the captions: see this old version of the page. The text was rewritten to include references to the figures.
In March 2008, Parrot of Doom tidied up the page and removed the numbers from the captions.

I'll re-edit the prose to remove the numbers completely, since both you and Parrot of Doom think they're bad practice. But can I suggest that you take a look through a page's history before you add a copyvio notice to it? Ecb (talk) 18:19, 18 May 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Height of flames ?[edit]

The article currently says, "At the height of the fire, pillars of flame approximately 45 m (145 feet) high ..." but the official report into the accident says (paragraph 62) "at the peak of the fire the column of flame issuing from Shaft No. 9 was about 150 metres high". Fathead99 (talk) 13:33, 7 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Does not add up[edit]

Of the 1,100,000 litres (240,000 imp gal; 290,000 US gal) of petrol carried by the train, 275,000 litres (60,000 imp gal; 73,000 US gal) were rescued by the British Rail (BR) train crew when they drove the locomotive and the first three tankers to safety. 16,000 litres (3,500 imp gal; 4,200 US gal) of petrol were recovered after the fire was extinguished and 900,000 litres (200,000 imp gal; 240,000 US gal) (670 tonnes / 660 long tons; 740 short tons) burned. that is a total of 1200 m³ not 1100m³. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 129.93.40.126 (talk) 23:08, 12 June 2010 (UTC)[reply]

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