Picture of the week: Liverpool 1881

We’re continuing to celebrate the launch of our new*railway photos section.*We added 500 new photos last week, so we’re up to over*4000 Creative Commons-licensed images from our collection*that you can browse at leisure.
It’s my turn to pick a Picture of the Week, and I’ve chosen this vertigo-inducing shot of the widening of a railway cutting in Liverpool in 1881. The supervisor playing dare with the edge of that precipitous drop – bashed out of the limestone years before by an army of navvies – helps convey the incredible scale that Victorian engineers were working at. The picture is from the*Crewe Works collection, which has plenty more like it – photos that demonstrate a dizzying contrast between us tiny, vulnerable-looking humans and the enormous and imposing things we’ve built.

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By the way, this is the railway from Liverpool Lime Street to Edge Hill (below), and the photo is taken at one of the points where the line dives into a tunnel – can anyone from the area work out exactly where?


Filed under: Image collections, Picture of the week Tagged: edge hill, liverpool, liverpool and manchester railway, liverpool lime street

 

I suspect it is Smithdown Lane Tunnel (existing slow line entrance going to Lime St). However, I would put a proviso on that as part of the cutting was built over in the last century and therefore it could be the entrance to Mount Pleasant Tunnel. Regardless it is one or the other as there are no other tunnels (afaik) in the cutting except those at Edge Hill. The key lies in the buildings in the background and whether they could be highlighted anymore?