BOURNE'S TUNNEL AT SJ5033491804

Bourne's Tunnel is a tunnel built in the late 1820s to carry a colliery tramway underneath the Liverpool & Manchester Railway Line. It is approximately 1 kilometre east of Rainhill station.

The tunnel is 104 feet long and constructed of coursed red sandstone in a skew design. The south portal features a single span segmental arch with vermiculated rusticated voussoirs set at a skew angle. Above the arch is a retaining wall with slightly projecting flat ashlar copings. The right side of the portal arch is obscured by a short side abutment wing, while a longer left abutment wing with flat ashlar copings extends from both sides, each with plain short terminal piers. The north portal is buried and not visible.

The interior is lined with horseshoe-arched stone. The skew alignment alters to straight alignment approximately 6 metres into the tunnel.

The tunnel was constructed for John, James and Peter Bourne, merchants of Liverpool, and their partner Robert Robinson, a Sutton coal proprietor. On 1 January 1824, they leased 20 acres of land in Rainhill from Bartholomew Bretherton, a local landowner and stagecoach proprietor, with permission to construct a railed way from their Sutton collieries through part of the Rainhill land to the Liverpool-Warrington turnpike road, where they installed a weighing machine and stockpiled coal.

When the Liverpool & Manchester Railway Line, the world's earliest locomotive passenger line, was constructed in the late 1820s under engineer George Stephenson's supervision, the railway directors recommended that the colliery tramway cross beneath the line through a tunnel. The identity of the designer is not definitively known, though it is believed that Thomas L. Gooch, George Stephenson's apprentice, possibly aided by Jesse Hartley, the Liverpool dock engineer, designed many of the Liverpool & Manchester Railway Line's bridges and likely this tunnel.

The Sutton collieries were later connected to the St Helens & Runcorn Gap Railway, which became operational from 1833. The tramway and turnpike road subsequently became increasingly obsolete. The Bourne brothers and Robert Robinson surrendered their lease in 1844 and the tramway was dismantled.