Text 1: The mountain opens, by Farah Morgan

An original contemporary newspaper feature.

At 5.40 in the morning, I climb aboard a service train and begin a journey into the mountain. The tunnel slopes down so gradually that I barely notice, but the daylight behind us shrinks to a white pin and then disappears. Ahead, under three kilometres of stone, more than a hundred people are building a railway.

The machine doing most of the digging is nearly ten metres across. Its circular face is crowded with steel cutting discs, which grind the rock into fragments as the whole machine inches forward. Behind it, mechanical arms lift curved concrete sections into place, forming the tunnel wall. On a good day, the crew advances fourteen metres. This morning, the display beside the control desk reads 3,812 metres.

Shift engineer Marian Cole says the mountain is never as solid as it looks. The surveys show where the hardest rock should be and where water may collect, but they cannot reveal every crack. "The machine tells us when the ground changes," she says, resting two fingers on the desk as if feeling for a pulse.

Just before seven, a warning sounds. Water is pushing through a joint in the newly exposed rock. To me, it appears at once that the mountain has sprung a leak: a silver sheet pours down the cutter's face and races along the floor channels. The crew do not race anywhere. Pumps are started, pressure readings are called out and a steel gate is closed behind us. Their calmness is so complete that I begin to feel embarrassed by the speed of my own heartbeat.

For six hours, the number on the display remains 3,812. Engineers inject sealing material into the joint while mechanics inspect the cutting head. The halted machine seems enormous and helpless. Then, shortly after one, the pumps fall quiet. The cutter begins to turn, slowly at first, and the display changes to 3,813. A cheer passes along the tunnel, brief but fierce.

Three months later, I return for the breakthrough. The crew on the opposite side have stopped less than a metre away. With the final turn of the cutter, a plate of rock cracks and drops inward. First there is a fist-sized hole, then a window filled with helmet lamps and waving hands. The two tunnels, begun from opposite sides of the mountain, meet only three centimetres away from the planned line. Marian checks the survey figures before she smiles. Around her, workers are already pocketing pieces of the last rock.

Text 2: Through Pennant Pass, by Edwin Price

An original journal written in a nineteenth-century voice; a period simulation, not an archival document.

In this journal, written in 1881, a surveyor describes the construction of a railway tunnel through a mountain.

March 3rd. I entered the western heading today. The passage is scarcely broad enough for two wagons, and the roof presses upon the mind though it may be twenty feet above one's hat. At the rock face, six men worked the drills in pairs, striking and turning the iron by turns. Each blow rang through the passage and returned from the darkness behind us. They gain perhaps six feet in a day, and call that excellent progress.

March 5th. The holes having been drilled, charges were placed and the warning bell sounded. We withdrew around the timber screen while Hale lit the fuses. Five reports came, each one shaking dust from the roof. We waited for the sixth. No man spoke. Hale took up his lamp and made to return, but Evans caught him by the coat. At that instant the last charge fired, throwing splinters of stone beyond the screen. Hale laughed afterwards, though I observed that he could not hold his cup steady.

March 6th. The smoke was drawn out and the broken rock loaded into wagons. Behind the drillers came the masons, setting brick where the roof was weak. Everything advances in this fashion: noise, smoke, shovels, bricks, and then the drills begin once more. The work appears brutally simple until one considers that every foot must keep to the line marked by my instruments. A small error here would become a great one before we reached the eastern party.

April 21st. We heard their charges today. The sound did not come along the passage but through the rock in front of us, a dull knock like someone demanding entrance. The men stopped work to listen. By evening, we could hear the eastern drills clearly between our own blows.

April 24th. At half past ten, Evans's drill broke into empty air. He put his eye to the narrow hole and shouted that he could see a lamp. We widened the opening until a man might crawl through, and the foremen shook hands in a cloud of dust. I measured our meeting point twice before giving the result: the two lines differed by less than four inches. The men lifted me onto a wagon and carried me to the entrance, although I protested all the way.

Both of these texts are about digging railway tunnels through mountains.

Compare:

• what the writers say about the challenges of the work
• how the writers convey the danger and the progress

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