Monsal Dale

[3] Whilst considered elegant today, with Grade II listed status being assigned to it in 1970,[4] when it was built in 1863 it was seen as destroying the beauty of the dale.

John Ruskin, considered to be Britain's leading cultural critic, harshly criticised the building of the railway: There was a rocky valley between Buxton and Bakewell, once upon a time, divine as the Vale of Tempe... You Enterprised a Railroad through the valley – you blasted its rocks away, heaped thousands of tons of shale into its lovely stream.

The valley is gone, and the Gods with it; and now, every fool in Buxton can be in Bakewell in half an hour, and every fool in Bakewell at Buxton; which you think a lucrative process of exchange – you Fools everywhere.A proposal that never came to fruition was for another viaduct for the Lancashire, Derbyshire and East Coast Railway to cross both the valley and the Midland Line, some three hundred feet high.

Monsal Dale railway station opened in 1866 to serve the villages of Upperdale and Cressbrook, with the latter's cotton mills.

Cut through solid limestone, they were both complex tunnels, on a gradient of 1 in 100, and curved to allow the line to conform to the terrain.