Cougar's tomb and City view may have once connected but there are no parts of City View that look like they were once part of Cougar's.
Date: 10th of May 2025
Entrance: 1.5m
Materials: Concrete, Brick, Bluestone
Shapes: Round, Box, Arch
Rating: ★★★★☆
Cougar's tomb may be one of the oldest drains in melbourne. The entrance is a bit of stoop but after about 400m it opens up to a walkable bluestone and redbrick arch.
From where the redbrick bluestone arch meets with the room there is an outline of where the drain originally would have continued straight. The room looks to be a pretty new addition to the drain.
The drain continues as a stoopy concrete pipe before opening back up to the redbrick bluestone arch.
Just after the segment of redbrick bluestone arch ends, there is this open section on either side of a busy railway. The open sections have a bunch of plants growing and it is quite a pretty garden.
To get to the other side you have to do a bit of a crawl through water and sand. Be cautious there is a lot of broken glass.
In the garden there is a small sidepipe named the Falafel tunnel, it is 1.35m until it hits a junction with two 900mm pipes. Down the right one are some small sections of RBT that go all the way up Nicholson Street mall, it does not get any bigger. Down the left tunnel it gets a tad bigger and then shrinks.
There is a large segment of drain that is starting to seep inwards, it may cave in sometime in the near future. There are also parts of the drain here that are covered in this black tar-like substance.
After a few low RCP sections and small junctions you end up at a wall. I think the drain would have continued upstream to the northern section of city view but the parts that are now city view would have been completely replaced with RCP when the rest of the drain was built.
Not too far behind the first junction there is a gutterbox that is only a short crawl from the main drain.
Date: 10th of May 2025
Entrance: 1.9m
Materials: Concrete,
Shapes: Round, Box
Rating: ★★☆☆☆
Not too hard to see where this drain got its name from when you look back from the outfall.
The entrance was about knee deep when did this drain and shallowed out after about 100m or so. At the end of the concrete box section there is a short pit of water that can be stepped over, and then it turns into RCP.
There are some really high manholes along the way to the exit and not much else. Just past the exit gutterbox is a small junction room with some old graff there.