The St. Clair Tunnel

Photo by Alan L Brown - Posted June, 2009

Plaque Location

The County of Lambton
The City of Sarnia
On the north side of St. Andrew Street
between Christina Street South and Vidal Street South

There is another plaque at this location called
The St. Clair Tunnel

Coordinates: N 42 57.461 W 82 24.614

Plaque Text

This was the first subaqueous tunnel in North America and one of the great engineering feats of the 19th century. Built in 1889-1891 to link the Canadian mainline of the Grand Trunk Railway with Chicago, the tunnel is 1,837 metres long with a 6-metre bore. Joseph Hobson, a Canadian engineer, designed and supervised its construction. His innovative combination of cutting shield excavation, cast iron tunnel lining, and compressed air broke the transportation bottleneck caused here and elsewhere by the impossibility of tunnelling through soft riverbeds.

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