Peter's Waterways Blog SUBTERRANEA BRITANNICA This was first published in IWA West Riding's Milepost in June 2018

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Subterranea Britannica is a members' group studying and investigating man-made and man-used underground places — from mines to railway tunnels, military defences to nuclear bunkers and everything in between. Canallers may only be interested in canal tunnels, but there is certainly some overlap of interests.

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And their appearance here may be slightly related to the April 2018 edition of their high-quality printed magazine Subterranea including some of my photographs of the inside of Standedge Tunnel. Another headline from the magazine says: "Thameslink's Canal Tunnels opened to the public on 26 February 2018". It's not a canal tunnel for navigation, though, but a tunnel under the Regents Canal built 12 years ago as part of HighSpeed1 project and only now beginning to be used for Thameslink services including Cambridge to Brighton.

And the next item refers to a campaign to use the Queensbury Tunnel between Halifax and Keighley, close in 1956, as part of a dedicated cycleway from Bradford to Halifax at an estimated cost of £4.3m. The official view is that spending £3.0m on filling critical lengths of the tunnel with concrete would be better.

Married to a sewerage engineer who talks of her work over lunch, I cannot resist the item about development of a fibre-optic sewer system with Sheffield University: cables would allow monitoring of sewage-pipe flow and pre-emptive action to prevent fatberg buildups, such as the 250-yard blockage in Whitechapel last year. Not to mention the possible cable use as part of t'internet. Peter Scott @peterjohnscott