MEN UNDER THE HILL

Manawatu Standard, Volume XLV, Issue 288, 9 November 1925, Page 2

MEN UNDER THE HILL

MEETING AFTER TWO YEARS, TUNNELLERS GRASP HANDS. It is a wonderful day for railway engineers when, perhaps after months of arduous work far below the surface, the two parties who have been burrowing a tunnel from opposite ends come suddenly face to face. And it is a triumph for their skill when, the parties having met, it is found that both halves of the tunnel almost coincide. This is just what‘ happened recently in England in the heart of the Malvern Hills. A new tunnel, nearly a mile long and 800 ft. below the highest part of the ridge, is being made for the Great Western Railway. 1 After working for two years from opposite sides of the hills, the workmen met, and it was with tremendous delight that the smallest of them squeezed through the apperture which was made at last in the wall which separated the two gangs. Like human moles the men had worked, servants to the little instruments which planned their course to a fraction of an inch. When the gap was widened and measurements compared, the central line of the tunnel was but a quarter of an inch out, and the floor level of the two halves differed by half an inch only' By next spring the tunnel will be completed; in June it is expected the first train will run through. Few of the passengers who will pass through the new tunnel will know of the wonders which are hidden on either side, the myriad symbols which havo revealed that this heart of the Malverns was once a coral strand under the sea. The rock through which the tunnel has been cut has been examined by geologists, and it is full of evidence that it is composed of the rock first formed when the earth cooled and solidified.

Before it was squeezed and pushed up by some vast convulsion this rock was a marine bed consisting of coral, and in it aro fossils which geologists say are traces of .the earth’s earliest forms of life. One of the geologists, Mr Wickham King, of Stourbridge, suggests that the Malvern Hills are but stumps of what, ages ago, “ages after the sea had left the land,” was a range of mighty mountains which he has called the Mercian Highlands.

First a marine bed, then a range of mountains, now a group of hills and smiling meadowlands —truly the earth is plastic in the hands of time!