So You Want to Build a Tunnel… — Practical Engineering [Note that this article is a transcript of the video embedded above.] It seems like homemade tunnels are kind of having a moment. Just about everywhere I look, it feels like someone is carving new spaces from the ground and documenting the process online. Colin Furze might be the quintessential example, with his wild tunnel project connecting his shop and house to an underground garage. You can watch the entire process in a series of videos on his YouTube channel, and he even started a second channel to share more details of the build. But he’s far from the only one. TikTok creator Kala, lovingly nicknamed “Tunnel Girl,” has been sharing the almost entirely solo excavation of a tunnel system below her house, amassing more than a million followers in the process. Zach from the JerryRigEverything channel has an ongoing series about a massive underground bunker project. Not strictly a tunnel, but in the same spirit. In Wisconsin, Eric Sutterlin and a team of volunteers have built Sandland, which features a maze of sandstone tunnels in the hillside that can occasionally be seen on the Save It For Parts Channel. My friend, Brent, bought the abandoned mining town of Cerro Gordo and regularly explores the shafts and drifts on his channel, Ghost Town Living. And there are lots more. Wikipedia has a whole page about “Hobby Tunneling,” which it defines as “tunnel construction as a pastime.” There’s something captivating about subterranean construction, delving into the deep, carving habitable space from the earth. In one case in Toronto, a tunnel was discovered in a public park, sparking headlines worldwide and fueling wild conspiracy theories about terrorist plots. Turns out, it was just a guy who liked digging. When he was interviewed by Macleans, he said (quote) “Honestly, I loved it so much. I don’t know why I loved it. It was just something so cool…” What more can you say than that? Some of us just yearn for the mines. Plenty of people have front yards and back yards, but not everyone has an underyard. But the thing is: underground construction is pretty dangerous. And not only that; it also poses a lot of very unique engineering challenges that a hobbyist might not be prepared to solve. So I thought it might be fun to do a little exploration into modern tunnel construction methods used in public infrastructure and how those lessons can be applied to endeavors of the more homemade variety. Don’t take it as advice; I am a civil engineer, but I’m not your civil engineer. That said, maybe I can at least give you a sense of what’s involved in a project like this, and some things you might want to study further before you get out the pickaxe and helmet light. I’m Grady, and this is Practical Engineering. I think one of the reasons that tunneling is so awesome is that the underground seems like a kind of no man’s land. It’s a different kind of wilderness – unexplored territory in a world where everyth

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