Chemical Weapons & Railway Tunnels - Australia

[Geoff Plunkett]

I draw the readers attention to an article I recently wrote for Australian Railway History, Chemical Warfare & Railway Tunnels. Surely one of the strangest uses for a railway tunnel was for the storage of chemical weapons. This occured west and south of Sydney, Australia during World War II and hundreds of thousands of weapons went through the four tunnels. The article is available in PDF format here;

Chemical Weapons & Railway Tunnels

See also Railway Historians Join Chemical Warfare Issue

and Chemical Warfare in Australia

Best
Geoff
[email protected]

 

[Mojo]

Hi Geoff

That was a great article and I'm still amazed by the number of things that took place during the War that are only coming to light today!

 

[Metroland]

All sorts of things were done in the UK during the war too. Decoy yards were common, one existed near March, Cambridgeshire at Benwick for Whitemoor. They locals didn't know about it until well after the war!

In cold war days there was also 'The strategic reserves', a bunch of steam locos kept for a post nuclear attack - nuclear weapons destroy electronics in cars, planes, modern trains etc

 

[Bill EWS]

Another ploy was when the military took over a number of large country houses and gave them names like HMS something or other and entered the names into the list of battleships. This was a ploy to fool the enemy into wasting time searching for a battleship that didn't exist. There is a couple in Berkshire and Wiltshire but they were probably all over the place. You can see one just south of Southcote Jct. on the Basingstoke branch.

 

[Geoff Plunkett]

For those interested two of the chemical warfare armourers, Geoff Burn and Arthur Lewis will feature on an upcoming episode of 'Cities of the Underworld' on the History Channel called Alcatraz Down Under. Their sequence was entirely shot in Glenbrook tunnel in the Blue Mountains of Australia. It will appear on Australia TV on Monday March 9th at 8.30pm (with an encore screening on Saturday 15th of March at 6.30pm). For US times see;

http://www.history.com/shows.do?episodeId=406276&action=detail

 

[Geoff Plunkett]

Here it is;

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kp1EFlngjKQ

 

[peterinsurrey]

very interesting about the glenbrook tunnel. I visited the tunnel as a kid a number of times. The only thing there was the mushroom farm.