London _Standard_ says, after an infancy of troubles and failures, and a
ten years' middle age of inaction, the Mersey Tunnel emerges into
notoriety under the hands of Mr. James Brunlees and Mr. C.D. Fox, and of
Mr. Waddell, the contractor, as a triumph of engineering skill. The
tunnel is 1,250 yards in length. It is driven through solid, but porous,
red sandstone, through which the water has percolated in volumes during
construction, at a level of about 30 feet below the bed of the river. It
is lined throughout with blue bricks, the brickwork of the invert being 3
feet in thickness. Its transverse section is a depressed oval 26 feet in
width and 21 feet in height, and it contains two lines of railway. At a
depth of about 18 feet below the main tunnel there is a continuous
drainage culvert 7 feet in diameter, entered at intervals by staple
shafts. There are two capacious underground terminal stations 400 feet
long, 50 feet broad, and 38 feet high, and gigantic lifts for raising 240
passengers in forty seconds, from more than three times the depth of the
Metropolitan Railway to the busy streets above. These splendid lifts, the
finest in the world, are now, through the engineering skill of Messrs.
Easton & Anderson, like the tunnel, accomplished facts; and their
construction and working were tested and reported on in high terms of
favor by the Government Inspector, General Hutchinson, a few weeks ago.
At the Liverpool end the direct descent to the underground platform of
the Mersey Railway is about 90 feet; at the Birkenhead end the depth is
something more.

The description of the Liverpool lifts will well suffice also for the
Birkenhead lifts. The former are under James Street, where above ground,
rising in lofty stateliness, is a fine tower for the hydraulic power, the
water being intended to be stored in a circular tank near its summit, the
dimensions of which will be 15 feet in diameter and its internal depth 9
feet. From the level of the rails of the Mersey Railway to the bottom of