Well after dark on a cool December night, I found myself following Random through the back yards of unsuspecting homeowners in a fairly well-to-do section of Richmond, heading towards the outfall of the Better Up Than Down drain.

And what an entrance! A pair of roughly 7' tall horseshoe-shaped tunnels poked out of the hillside, dumping into a large pool of water. And any drainer will tell you, there's something special about tunnels of this shape... maybe it's that the flat floor makes walking easier? Or that they're few and far between? Who knows.

Random and I made our way up the tunnel, stopping to investigate a small brick chamber off to one side. Shortly, though, the tunnels changed into a pair of (roughly) 5.5' round concrete pipes. We pressed onward, enjoying the cool sights and smells of the tunnel. Every so often, a manhole shaft would descend from the surface. These featured interesting brick architecture, and varied in height from roughly 5' to 15' tall. After a ways, we came to an interesting brick junction room, where the two 5.5' pipes combined into a single 6.5' pipe. This make waking much easier, as were were no longer forced to stoop to avoid hitting our heads. Here we started noticing marks from the construction workers who had installed the drain. Each segment of concrete pipe was marked with "OK", presumably to indicate that it met specifications. We did notice a few labeled "NO GOOD" or with other less positive comments, though. Oops, maybe they weren't meant to have been used?

After passing further into the round pipe, we came to an interesting symmetrical junction, where a pair of smaller pipes came in on either side of the main pipe. From here, though, the main pipe dropped back down to around 5.5'. Pressing on, we eventually (after much slipping and sliding, I swear the drain floor kept getting slipperier and slipperier) came to yet another junction, where the main pipe split into two smaller pipes... too small for comfortable travel over any real distance. Random announced that this was the end of the line, and proceeded to negotiate his way up the brick manhole shaft above us. After hearing the manhole cover slide out of place, I followed him up and out of the shaft. We found ourselves on the edge of a road in a nice neighborhood, emerging next to an attractive young lady taking her dog for a late-night walk. It was great.

The Better Up Than Down drain is great. Even though it lacks the twists and turns that seem to be the trademark of drains in Charlottesville, it has some very cool brickwork in the junction rooms and manhole shafts, as well as interesting shape changes. It's also pretty long (for a Virginia drain), and features neat freeform concrete slides and such in the junction rooms, which seem to be pretty unique.

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