tough interior scene very noisy..

Wow that completely cured the problem!

The original long light I had actually consisted of 32 individual lights, which I had originally attached to each other thinking one long light would render faster than 32 individual lights.. oops!

I grouped the 32 lights into 8 groups of 4, effectively making 8 vray lights.
Changed the preset back to interior, and edited it to change all the lights to 16 subdivisions.
and re-adjusted the intensity of the lights to match what I had created with the one long light.

With the light being split up I could actually render with only 6 lights on at a time now, for still shots, as the tunnel is so long that the ones on either end are completely out of sight/ no use. So that is a total of 8 individual lights it doesn't have to compute.

I thought I would see a bigger time difference but they both took about 10 minutes with only a 27 second difference.

Thank you very much for your help!!