one of the oldest railway tunnels in the world, it opened in 1841, taking the line at its highest point between Littleborough and Todmorden under the Pennines, designed by Thomas Longridge Gooch, it cost over £250,000 and the lives of 41 men, from Tait’s ‘Views on the Manchester and Leeds Railway, Drawn from Nature and on Stone by A.F. Tait’, (1819-1905), the Liverpool-born artist who trained with the print publishers, Agnew and Zanetti, in Manchester, applying his burgeoning interest in landscape and nature to depicting this series of beautiful scenes in Lancashire and Yorkshire in the later 1840s, before emigrating to America, in 1850, where he became very well known as a wildlife painter, was widely published by Currier & Ives, and was elected a member of the National Academy of Design in New York,
original hand-coloured lithograph, printed by Day & Son, 335 x 255 mm. (13 1/4 x 10 in), marginal browning and an exposure line, well outside the image, [Abbey Life 411],