Have you ever had a location that’s just absolutely haunted you?
The story of the devils tunnel for me is a cautionary tale for explorers to always keep your ear to the ground about locations and to always ask around, it also highlights the extraordinary legacy of the Cave Clan.
My search for the Devils tunnel begins in 2018, although it’s history with urban explorers extends back more than a decade before this date.
Allow me to set the scene. It’s probably maths class and teenage Grimbo is bored as fuck, so instead of figuring out how to solve an equation for an unknown side of a triangle he begins his usual search terms. “Adelaide tunnels”, “Adelaide urbex”, etc; etc. I saw a result I’d never seen before, Ikonvisual.com. I clicked slightly cautiously.
A spooky x-ray skeleton popped up, and I was left bewildered as to what this page had to with the city of Adelaide or urbex.
I clicked around and found that the spooky skeleton was in fact a hyperlink to a stylised collection of mid 2000’s image galleries chock full of vintage exploring shots. Noice.
After playing around for a bit I saw a gallery that made me raise an eyebrow.
“The Devils tunnel: The devil made me do it, a tunnel with an unknown purpose and history”. I clicked and was bewildered by what I was looking at, an amalgamation of stone, steel and concrete piled upon each other in some of the strangest drain construction I’d ever seen.
Needless to say, I had to find this spot.
Flash forward 4 years. Nothing.
That’s not to say I hadn’t tried, but what the fuck was I meant to do? None of the search terms I plugged in came up with anything. I brought my plight up with Jim of Jim’s Urbex, and how I had been scouring the creeks of norward and burnside to see if it was a culverted section of first creek, a tributary to the river Torrens. It was around April of 2022 when I received a message out of the blue from Jim, “I was reading the re-prints of TED released by Doug, they mentioned the devil’s tunnel and where abouts it is.
Say less.
Myself, Rahu and Drift shot off towards the bush town of Peterborough on a mission. We were finding this fucking tunnel. After some detours too check out some gigantic railway culverts along the way we found ourselves in Peterborough. I began jumping and stooping my way through tiny drains, at one point followed by two young kids on bikes, “Is this the devils tunnel?” I asked them, “Nah sorry mate, this is the witch’s tunnel”, Fucks sake. Now there are witches’ tunnels!? The fuck is happening in this town?!!!
Thing were getting hopeless. We had been searching for about 2 hours and had found fuck all, I began to wonder if it had been filled in. While driving past the steam ranger depot, now a museum, drift stopped and said, “I recognise this”, “What?” I replied back, “From the photo, I was talking to my mate about it and he reckons it’s it”, We looked at the photo, and then back up to the two holes in the ground.
Bulls. Fucking. Eye.
Now, after that you’re probably waiting to see some photos that aren’t nearly as old as I am. But you’ll have to wait sorry, because there is actually some history for this tunnel that I have uncovered from the help of the state archives.
Peterborough wasn’t always a miserable and dying country town, it was once the hub for steam rangers in the bush prior to journeys to the northern territory. Now, for all you Europeans reading this, the further north you go in Australia the hotter things get, this obviously means less water, no good if your mode of transport is reliant on steam. Peterborough originally had 3 wells, however after nearly 100 years of service they had begun to dry up. The beginning of the solution is detailed in this report from 1951, digitized by the department of mines.
If you don't want to read a mining document, basically the department of mines was contracted to construct a surface reservoir to help with supply to the steam ranger depot.
This was their final design.
As you can see when contrasting the two images, they were successful in their goal to build the reservoir.
However, the depot was still on low lying ground, meaning water would flood to get to the reservoir. The solution was the cure all devils tunnel, doubling as storm water drainage and a service tunnel for the supply pipeline. This is why there are sections in the devils tunnel that are open air, to allow light into the tunnel so engineers, technicians and mechanics of yesteryear work on the tunnel with ease. Now overgrown.
With the history, purpose and story of the devils tunnel out of the way, please. Enjoy some lovely mishmash drainage/supply/service tunnel photos.
Until next time.
See you space grimbo
The story of the devils tunnel for me is a cautionary tale for explorers to always keep your ear to the ground about locations and to always ask around, it also highlights the extraordinary legacy of the Cave Clan.
My search for the Devils tunnel begins in 2018, although it’s history with urban explorers extends back more than a decade before this date.
Allow me to set the scene. It’s probably maths class and teenage Grimbo is bored as fuck, so instead of figuring out how to solve an equation for an unknown side of a triangle he begins his usual search terms. “Adelaide tunnels”, “Adelaide urbex”, etc; etc. I saw a result I’d never seen before, Ikonvisual.com. I clicked slightly cautiously.
A spooky x-ray skeleton popped up, and I was left bewildered as to what this page had to with the city of Adelaide or urbex.
I clicked around and found that the spooky skeleton was in fact a hyperlink to a stylised collection of mid 2000’s image galleries chock full of vintage exploring shots. Noice.
After playing around for a bit I saw a gallery that made me raise an eyebrow.
“The Devils tunnel: The devil made me do it, a tunnel with an unknown purpose and history”. I clicked and was bewildered by what I was looking at, an amalgamation of stone, steel and concrete piled upon each other in some of the strangest drain construction I’d ever seen.
Needless to say, I had to find this spot.
Flash forward 4 years. Nothing.
That’s not to say I hadn’t tried, but what the fuck was I meant to do? None of the search terms I plugged in came up with anything. I brought my plight up with Jim of Jim’s Urbex, and how I had been scouring the creeks of norward and burnside to see if it was a culverted section of first creek, a tributary to the river Torrens. It was around April of 2022 when I received a message out of the blue from Jim, “I was reading the re-prints of TED released by Doug, they mentioned the devil’s tunnel and where abouts it is.
Say less.
Myself, Rahu and Drift shot off towards the bush town of Peterborough on a mission. We were finding this fucking tunnel. After some detours too check out some gigantic railway culverts along the way we found ourselves in Peterborough. I began jumping and stooping my way through tiny drains, at one point followed by two young kids on bikes, “Is this the devils tunnel?” I asked them, “Nah sorry mate, this is the witch’s tunnel”, Fucks sake. Now there are witches’ tunnels!? The fuck is happening in this town?!!!
Thing were getting hopeless. We had been searching for about 2 hours and had found fuck all, I began to wonder if it had been filled in. While driving past the steam ranger depot, now a museum, drift stopped and said, “I recognise this”, “What?” I replied back, “From the photo, I was talking to my mate about it and he reckons it’s it”, We looked at the photo, and then back up to the two holes in the ground.
Bulls. Fucking. Eye.
Now, after that you’re probably waiting to see some photos that aren’t nearly as old as I am. But you’ll have to wait sorry, because there is actually some history for this tunnel that I have uncovered from the help of the state archives.
Peterborough wasn’t always a miserable and dying country town, it was once the hub for steam rangers in the bush prior to journeys to the northern territory. Now, for all you Europeans reading this, the further north you go in Australia the hotter things get, this obviously means less water, no good if your mode of transport is reliant on steam. Peterborough originally had 3 wells, however after nearly 100 years of service they had begun to dry up. The beginning of the solution is detailed in this report from 1951, digitized by the department of mines.
If you don't want to read a mining document, basically the department of mines was contracted to construct a surface reservoir to help with supply to the steam ranger depot.
This was their final design.
As you can see when contrasting the two images, they were successful in their goal to build the reservoir.
However, the depot was still on low lying ground, meaning water would flood to get to the reservoir. The solution was the cure all devils tunnel, doubling as storm water drainage and a service tunnel for the supply pipeline. This is why there are sections in the devils tunnel that are open air, to allow light into the tunnel so engineers, technicians and mechanics of yesteryear work on the tunnel with ease. Now overgrown.
With the history, purpose and story of the devils tunnel out of the way, please. Enjoy some lovely mishmash drainage/supply/service tunnel photos.
Until next time.
See you space grimbo
