Clifton Rocks Railway

Sunday 12th January 2020

While looking at the map around Clifton Suspension Bridge something else of interest sprang off the page. In Sion Hill a little south of the suspension bridge was marked “Clifton Rocks Railway”. Searching the web revealed a disused funicular railway. In a tunnel. I had to go and have a look obviously.

The former top station is next to the Avon Gorge Hotel and is where there is most to see from the street. There were two entrances for passengers which lead down to the ticket hall and platforms below street level and you can look down through the iron railings into this area. A gap in the old awning of glass and iron pavement lights allows you to throw donations into a dustbin with a bell in. These donations go to the Clifton Rocks Railway Trust which has been formed by a group of volunteers to restore the Railway. Not as a working railway unfortunately as subsequent re-use of the tunnels since the railway closed in 1934 make that an impractical proposition.

The railway opened in 1893 it had taken two years to build and cost £30,000 -twice as long and three times as much as originally planned. (Sound familiar?)

The tunnel is 500 feet long rising 240 feet at a gradient of 1:2.2. Semi-elliptical and lined with bricks it is 27 feet 6 inches wide andv18 feet high with two pairs of tracks allowing operation of four cars, in pairs connected by steel cables.

The cars were raised and lowered by means of adding or removing water from tanks under the car floors to balance the weight of car, passengers, and water tank so that the upper car going down pulled the lower car up the incline.

The railway was very popular on opening but that didn’t last and in 1908 it went into receivership, being purchased by the Bristol Tramway and Carriage Co.

In 1922 The Portway road (now the A4 Hotwell Road) was widened. This required the closure and demolition of the Bristol Port and Pier Railway from Sneyd Park junction up to and including the Hotwells terminus, leaving the Rocks Railway somewhat isolated. Also having a major road placed only inches from the bottom station made, and still makes, access difficult.

That rather heralded or at least hastened the end for the operation of the Clifton Rocks Railway and in 1934 it ceased operations.

This wasn’t the end of the line for the tunnel though. Well it was the end of the line as a railway obviously but five years later the tunnel, like so many others, got a new use.

At the outbreak of the Second World War the Ministry of Works and Buildings leased the tunnel from the Tramways Company. In March, 1940. British Overseas Airways built an office suite and used part of the upper tunnel for storage. The ARP (Air Raid Precaution) Committee established air raid shelter number 1898.

In 1941 the four cars which had remained at the bottom of the tunnel since the railway closed were removed and the BBC moved in. They built a complex in the tunnel of four main chambers and three smaller rooms in the bottom station. From the top these contained transmitters, a studio for creating programmes, a recording room to record programmes which also contained enough recorded material for several weeks’ broadcasting, and a control room where eighty GPO land lines to other BBC sites could be switched. 

The three small rooms contained generators, ventilation plant, and of course a canteen because you can’t fight against Lord Haw-Haw without plenty of tea.

In the event the main BBC Bristol studios were never put out of action by the German bombing so the emergency studio at Clifton was never needed but the useful control room alone made the tunnel conversion worthwhile. The BBC continued to make use of the site until 1960 when advances in radio technology rendered it redundant.

In the late 1950s it became apparent that the facia of the bottom station was beginning to part company with the cliff face, a four inch wide crack having appeared between it and the rock face.As a result a series of tied buttresses were constructed along the face of the tunnel in Hotwell Road. These steel sections encased in concrete were anchored to the cliff using inclined anchors connecting the top of the assembly down into the rock behind. This has rather defaced the original facia of the bottom station.

The information above is just a brief summary of that supplied by Richard Hope-Hawkins on the excellent Cliff Rocks Railway website which is well worth visiting if you want to know more. You can also book tours via that site when they are running. I do hope they manage to open the site properly as a tourist attraction, given its proximity to the suspension bridge it surely has great potential.