h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

No not me yer buggers, the western tunnel of the Dartford Crossing was open 50 years ago today.

A667839

You mean it used to be even more congested than it is these days?

No, I don't think it was, apart from, read on...

When I was a kid we used to visit some people on a farm in Sussex a couple of times each summer. I vaguely remember us driving into London and through the Blackwall Tunnel when I was five or six, but then the Dartford Tunnel opened and it cut so much time off the journey, but it was exciting too because it was brand new.

But I also remember that we must have been stuck in traffic jams on the southbound journey because I was fascinated by what I think were cement-manufacturing plants or quarries. My dad told me they were something to do with cement and I was fascinated by them. There was plenty of time for me to look at them because we moved past them very slowly. I think the reason for that was queueing up to pay the toll, and it was always around mid-morning, whereas coming back in the evening was always much quicker. I can't remember though if there was a toll in both directions, or just in one direction, like they have for some bridges and tunnels.

I've just had a quick butchers at where they used to be, immediately to the east of the road and about half a mile to a mile north of the river, and it looks like it's all industrial estates now.

Thinking about it a bit more, I think the Dartford Tunnel was the first one I ever went through where the radio didn't go out as soon as you went underground, because by the time I started driving in the 1980s they'd fitted repeaters inside the tunnel so that you never missed a moment of Steve Wright in the Afternoon, or Bob at the Yard on GLC It was always kind of going through the Rotherhithe Tunnel and getting a sudden five-second blast of radio when you passed underneath the ventilation shafts.

I don't think you get radio all the way through anymore. I don't remember ever going through one tunnel with traffic coming the other way, but it's probable I did, as I would have been ten when the second tunnel opened. I do remember traffic flowing both ways when one tunnel was shut, but I don't remember why one tunnel might have been shut. Lots of congestion then! I'll have to ask my dad again for more memories.

I imagine you can get cellphone service all the way through the tunnel though. I do remember that.

When we were still using the Blackwall Tunnel there would have been two-way traffic in just the one bore because the second bore wasn't opened until four years after the Dartford Tunnel. That *was* scary

And I meant Bob at the Yard on GLR, of course. Not GLC