Mono Photographic Tunnel Profiling 
  
By H.Anderson and D.Stevens 
BKS Surveys Ltd., Coleraine and Swindon, United Kingdom 
Prologue 
Tunnels have been built by man since earliest times. Irrigation tunnels 
were an important feature in Babylonia, and it is thought that a pedestrian 
tunnel under the Euphrates river connecting the temple to the royal palace 
on the opposite bank was built around four thousand years ago. Some 
drainage and water supply tunnels built by the Romanas are still in use 
today. 
The development of canals as a transportation system heralded modern 
tunnel construction with the 157m long Languedoc tunael built in France 
in the 17th century (c.681). In 1761 James Brindley built an aquaduct 
with a tunnel at each end to transport coal from Worsley Mill to 
Manchester. One of the first important canal tunnels built in England was 
the 2,533 m bore at Harecastle completed in 1777. 
The advent of the railway in the first half of the 19th century led to notable 
advances in tunnelling with bores being driven by such celebrated 
engineers as Sir Marc Isambard Brunel, his son Isambard Kingdom Brunel, 
Joseph Locke, Thomas Telford and Robert Stephenson. One of the 
earliest steam railway tunnels (partly through soft ground) , at Box in 
Wiltshire, is nearly 3 km long and was completed in 1841 (Engineer - 
I. EK. Brunel. 
Tunnel construction was hampered due to the lack of knowledge of soil 
mechanics. The problems caused by unstable soil conditions continue to 
influence tunnels throughout their lives, causing bulges, flats and 
other deformations in rhe tunnel linings. Weaknesses can sometimes 
result in collapse, of which recent examples are Penmanshiel and Preston 
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