TOWNLINE TUNNEL

The 'Townline Tunnel', located in Welland, Ontario, Canada, is an underwater tunnel, carrying 'Highway 58A' as well as the Canadian Pacific Railway under the Welland Canal.

Contents

The highway

The tunnel

External links

The highway

The tunnel

The highway

'Highway 58A' is a provincially maintained highway in the Niagara Region. It is a short link between Highways '140' and '58' underneath the canal.
The 4.4 km (2.7 mi) long highway is important from the province's point of view as a possible spot where the planned Mid-Peninsula Highway might cross the Welland Canal. Should that happen, the designation of Highway 58A will be removed.

The tunnel

The Townline Tunnel is a two-cell reinforced concrete tunnel with a rectangular cross-section. The roof is a post-tensioned concrete slab.
The tunnel was built as a part of the Welland By-Pass project. Its construction was relatively easy since, like the Main Street Tunnel, it was being built at the same time as the channel above it and a simple cut and cover method could be used.
The tunnel provides a sidewalk for pedestrians, two lanes for vehicular traffic, as well as room for three sets of tracks for rail vehicles. It was opened for automobiles on July 13, 1972, and the first train crossed the tunnel on January 31, 1973.
The tunnel is 330 metres (1083 feet) long and 35 metres (115 feet) wide. Due to low grade required for trains, the approaches to the tunnel stretch 4 km (2.5 miles) in each direction. This necessited the removal of about 13,750,000 cubic meters (18,000,000 cubic yards) of material and construction of three viaducts on each side of the canal. As well, a solid earth plug had to be put into the Welland Recreational Waterway (the old alignment of the canal), cutting it in two (satellite photo). The construction cost $40 million. The middle rail line was removed in the 1990's and the two reamining tracks now serve as the CPR Hamilton Subdivision and the CPR Brookfield Siding.
Its design was somewhat controversial due to its limitation to only two lanes for cars. It was argued that widening it to contain more lanes would not have prohibitively raised the cost of the project. However, the Main Street Tunnel was built with four lanes of traffic instead. This decision may backfire as the planned Mid-Peninsula Highway will need to cross the Welland Canal somewhere in the Welland-Port Colborne area. The Main Street Tunnel is ill-suited for the purpose as it doesn't offer an easy way to cross the Welland-Pelham urban area. In contrast, the rail lines emerging from the Townline Tunnel travel through a wide, straight corridor across Welland (as seen in the second picture on the right), but the Townline Tunnel has only two lanes for traffic and a widening is deemed costly. Had more lanes been built originally, the link would be ready for use. On the other hand, two-thirds of the railroad tunnel's width are presently unused and can be easily retrofitted for auto traffic. Ironically, the Main Street Tunnel is arguably underused, as the roads it connects — Highway 406, Highway 140 and Niagara Road 27 — are all two lanes wide.

External links

The highway

★ Ontario Highways: 58A

★ History of Highway 58A

The tunnel

★ Satellite picture of the tunnel

★ Newspaper clippings about the tunnel's construction

★ Transport Canada's page on the tunnel