Three tunnels, one abandoned since 1981, and dozens of navvies never went home after building the first.
Walk the Trans Pennine Trail out of Dunford Bridge on the South Yorkshire side of the Pennines, and you’re walking on a railway that once carried more Manchester-to-Sheffield traffic than any other route in the country. The trains stopped in 1981. What’s left is three parallel tunnels driven straight through the hill, sealed at both ends, one of them still doing a job nobody who built it could have imagined.
When it opened, the Woodhead Tunnel was one of the longest railway tunnels in the world. Getting it built cost more lives than most people who walk the trail today would guess. What it carries now isn’t trains at all.
Location: Woodhead, on the Yorkshire and Derbyshire border, portals at Dunford Bridge (South Yorkshire) and Woodhead (Derbyshire)
Best for: industrial history, a flat and accessible walking or cycling route, a genuine feat of Victorian engineering
Getting there: nearest railway station is Penistone, on the Sheffield to Huddersfield line; drive to Dunford Bridge car park via the A628 or A616
Open: the Trans Pennine Trail section is open at all times; the tunnels themselves are sealed and not open to the public
Admission: free
The Story of Woodhead Tunnel
The Sheffield, Ashton-under-Lyne and Manchester Railway drove the first Woodhead Tunnel through the Pennines between Yorkshire and Derbyshire, completing it around 1845 after roughly six years of work. At close to three miles long, it ranked among the longest railway tunnels in the world at the time and was the first to cut straight through the Pennine watershed rather than route around it.
The workforce building it ran to around 1,500 men at points, cutting through solid Pennine gritstone by hand and black powder, with no mechanical boring equipment to speed the work. The cost was high in every sense: contemporary estimates put the total spend at a figure equivalent to well over £20 million today, and the human cost was worse. Sources describe several dozen navvies losing their lives during construction, with figures cited across different accounts ranging into the thirties, along with well over a hundred serious injuries. There was no local accommodation for the workforce, so contractors threw up shanty villages on the moorland to house them, and conditions in those camps were bad enough that cholera and other illnesses spread through them alongside the accident toll from the tunnelling itself. Whatever the exact final count, the Woodhead Tunnel ranks among the deadliest civil engineering projects of Victorian Britain, with a casualty rate that some accounts compare unfavourably to contemporary military engagements.
A second, parallel tunnel was built in the early 1850s to cope with growing traffic, and a third opened around a century after the first, built to modern standards and intended to finally resolve the bottleneck the original Victorian bores had become. None of it was enough to save the line in the long run. British Rail withdrew passenger services from the Woodhead route, and the last train ran through in 1981, ending well over a century of continuous use on a line that had once carried more coal and freight traffic across the Pennines than almost any other crossing.
What You See When You Visit
There’s nothing dramatic to see at either portal today, which is part of what makes Woodhead worth visiting rather than just reading about. The Trans Pennine Trail runs along the old trackbed from Dunford Bridge towards Penistone, a flat, well-surfaced route through open Pennine moorland, following the upper Don Valley with Winscar Reservoir close by. The tunnel portals themselves are fenced and sealed, National Grid property rather than a tourist attraction, so what you’re really walking is the approach to something you can’t go inside, a railway that stops dead at a hillside.
That’s nothing. Standing at the sealed portal, with the hill rising above you and the trail curving away towards Penistone, gives a genuine sense of the scale of what Victorian engineers were willing to attempt through solid Pennine gritstone with nineteenth-century tools. The wind up here rarely lets up, and on a grey day the moorland around Dunford Bridge looks much as it would have to the navvies who worked this ground.
Since the 1960s, National Grid has used one of the sealed tunnels to carry a 400kV electricity cable beneath the Peak District, part of the transmission link between Stalybridge and Thorpe Marsh. The decision to route cables through the old railway tunnels rather than string new overhead lines across the moor came after objections at a public inquiry by the Peak Park Planning Board, which didn’t want pylons across the landscape. So the tunnel that once carried coal and passengers between Manchester and Sheffield now carries the power that keeps the lights on for both cities, just invisibly. National Grid has since run cable replacement and maintenance projects through the tunnels, work that goes almost entirely unnoticed by anyone walking the trail above.
Why It Matters
Most of Britain’s abandoned railway infrastructure gets demolished, filled in, or left to collapse quietly. Woodhead is different: it survived because it proved useful for something else entirely. That’s a rarer story than straightforward closure and decay, and it says something about how Victorian engineering, built to standards nobody needed for a mid-twentieth-century electricity cable, ended up serving a purpose its builders never imagined by roughly a century.
The human cost of building it is easy to overlook on a pleasant walk along the Trans Pennine Trail. Nobody erected a memorial naming the men who died cutting through this hill, and no single agreed number exists for how many that was. What’s certain is that the casualty toll here far exceeded the cost in lives of most Victorian infrastructure projects, and the shanty villages that housed the workforce have left no trace beyond old photographs and local record offices.
That absence of a memorial is worth noticing in itself. Britain has plaques and monuments for far smaller losses of life than this one, and the men who dug Woodhead by hand, working in cramped, poorly ventilated conditions with the constant risk of rockfall and flooding, have largely gone unrecorded by name. What survives is the tunnel itself, still doing useful work more than 180 years after the first navvy broke ground, which is its own kind of quiet memorial even without a plaque attached to it.
When to Go
The trail is walkable and rideable in any season, since it’s flat, well-surfaced and doesn’t depend on tide or opening hours the way many Secret Yorkshire destinations do. Spring and autumn offer the most comfortable walking conditions. Winter brings the moorland setting into sharper focus, cold and exposed, closer to what the navvies who built the tunnel would have worked through, but wrap up properly, there’s little shelter along the route.
Getting There
By train, Penistone station sits on the Northern-operated Sheffield to Huddersfield line and is the nearest railhead, though you’ll need a bike, car or a fair walk to reach Dunford Bridge from there. By car, Dunford Bridge has its own car park, accessible from both the A628 and the A616, making it the easiest starting point for a there-and-back walk to the tunnel portal, or for a longer walk or cycle ride along the trail towards Penistone.
Where to Eat and Drink Nearby
The Dog and Partridge, Flouch, near Langsett, sits a short drive from Dunford Bridge on the edge of the Peak District and serves pub food alongside its restaurant, The Beaters, a practical stop before or after a walk on the trail.
Where to Stay
Cubley Hall, Penistone. A hotel with a restaurant and bar in a converted hall, a short drive from Dunford Bridge and useful as a base for exploring the wider Trans Pennine Trail.
Worth Knowing
Woodhead 1 opened around 1845 as one of the longest railway tunnels in the world, and remained in continuous use for well over a century before the entire route closed in 1981.
Nobody agrees on an exact death toll for the tunnel’s construction. Figures cited across different sources range from the twenties to the thirties, a reminder that Victorian industrial casualties were often undercounted at the time and remained so.
The tunnels didn’t sit empty for long after the railway closed. National Grid had already been using one of them to carry high-voltage cable since the 1960s, routing power beneath the Peak District rather than stringing new pylons across it.
Practical Tips
Wear proper walking or cycling shoes; the Trans Pennine Trail surface is good, but this is still open moorland with no shelter for long stretches.
Bring layers regardless of the season; the Dunford Bridge to Penistone stretch sits high and exposed, and conditions change fast up here.
Do not attempt to approach or enter the sealed tunnel portals. They’re operational National Grid infrastructure carrying live high-voltage cables, not ruins to explore.
For the full route and variations between Dunford Bridge and Penistone, the AllTrails app has the Pennine Trail section logged with reviews and elevation details.
Toilets are available at Winscar Reservoir near Dunford Bridge and in Penistone itself; there’s little else along the route, so plan accordingly and carry water and snacks if you’re walking the full stretch to Penistone and back.
Reader Q&A
Can you go inside the Woodhead Tunnel? No. The tunnels are sealed and owned by National Grid and carry live high-voltage electrical cables. They are not open to the public and shouldn’t be approached beyond the fenced portal areas.
How many people died building the tunnel? Sources disagree on an exact figure, with estimates ranging from the low twenties to the low thirties, alongside well over a hundred serious injuries. No definitive contemporary record survives.
Why did the railway close in 1981? Declining traffic and the cost of maintaining an ageing electrified route led British Rail to withdraw services, ending more than a century of continuous use through the tunnels.
Is the Trans Pennine Trail suitable for families? Yes, the Dunford Bridge to Penistone section is flat and well-surfaced, suitable for walking, cycling and most pushchairs, though there’s little shelter if the weather turns.
Woodhead’s railway is gone, but the hill it was cut through is still doing exactly the job it was built for, just for electricity instead of trains, and that quiet second life is easy to miss from a landscape that gives away almost nothing about what runs beneath it, a pattern this coast and county share with the pubs Britain hides behind ordinary doors and the Yorkshire history still working under the surface.
