After a bit of prep for my first ever shot at UrbEx, me and my boyfriend (MrMeep on these forums) decided to have a shot at going upto Clayton Tunnel.
Since we're fairly interested in trains and such, we thought it would be a good shout to go there. Both me and him did a fair bit of research, and it seems the Clayton line sort of made a triangle along with the Queensbury and Thornton one. The Clayton line heads down to Bradford town center, and if you get on a train to leeds, you can see a bricked up tunnel that is part of the Clayton line when you pull out of the interchange and go around the corner (Left hand side). And the other two parts of the line lead towards Halifax and Keighley.
Here's a map to sort of picture what I mean...
The last 'exploration' of the tunnel we could find was in 2009, so we were a bit unsure as to whether we would be able to get in or not. But we thought we'd have a go at it anyway. We started from the bottom of Clayton, so it was a fair trek to get up to the tunnels.
The walk alone upto the tunnel was tiring enough, then we realized we had to go down a steep gradient. Sign lol. I'm gonna say it was about 45 degrees, and luckily, I'd brought a... small 20m rope, so that helped us down about 2/3rds of the hill. It was about 35 meters down.
Seeing the iron door made us worry a bit, and unfortunately our predictions of the door being locked were right... it was locked with a 5 number combination lock x__x We did stand there for a good 10 or so minutes trying to guess obvious combinations, but we had no luck. We even did an optimistic, quick google on our phones to try see if we could get the combination off there, but nope. Quite gutted as I was looking forward to going into it, after having heard that it's supposedly haunted by two workers who died in the first shaft.
So we clambered back up the hill. My boyfriend then suggested we try the Queensbury tunnel, which was nearby. It was surprisingly easy to find. There was this bridge not far from the Clayton Tunnel, and we decided to follow under it and try tracing where the tracks would go. We did come to a few things that accounted for the route we took.
We found the entrance to the Queensbury tunnel, but it was a bit of an arse to get to. The ground all the way upto the entrance is flooded and thick with mud about 3-6 inches deep. Seeing this entrance also closed with a metal door/gate, we decided to just go upto the front of it for the sake of it. Can't really hurt in trying afterall.
So, once we got upto it, after trying our best to avoid the awful mud, we found that this one was also locked with the exact same kind of lock. This entrance was vaguely more interesting though, as we could actually see into it through the gaps. It was kind of interesting, you could see all the way down and see the exit [I think it's 2 mile long?] but the camera wouldn't pick it up right.
But yeah, I guess if anything, this report validates the fact that it is now pointless going to either Queensbury or Clayton tunnel... as they're both completely sealed off. Unless you like, y'know, looking at metal doors... then it's pretty fun.
Photos were taken by MrMeep, of course.