Blue Ridge Tunnel
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Blue Ridge Tunnel was the longest of 4 tunnels built on the Blue Ridge Railroad to cross the Blue Ridge Mountains at Rockfish Gap near Afton Mountain in Central Virginia.
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[edit] Overview
The Blue Ridge Railroad was incorporated by the Commonwealth of Virginia in 1849 with Claudius Crozet as chief engineer. Its purpose was to provide a crossing of the Blue Ridge Mountains for the Virginia Central Railroad. The Virginia Board of Public Works, always keen to help with "internal improvements" owned some of the Virginia Central stock, and virtually all of the Blue Ridge Railroad. Crozet had identified the eventual route as early as 1839. Rail service reached Charlottesville by 1851; westward, the railroad closely followed the alignment of the ancient Three Chopt Road.
To protect its investment, and enable transportation, the State then incorporated and financed the Blue Ridge Railroad to accomplish the hard and expensive task of crossing the Blue Ridge mountain barrier to the west. Rather than attempting the more formidable Swift Run Gap, under the leadership of the great early civil engineer Claudius Crozet, the state-owned Blue Ridge Railroad built over the mountains at the next gap to the south, Rockfish Gap near Afton Mountain, using four tunnels, including the 4,263-foot (1,299 m) Blue Ridge Tunnel near the top of the pass. When complete, it was the longest in the US and one of the longest tunnels in the world, a remarkable feat of engineering, dug though solid granite with only hand drills and black powder, a decade before the invention of dynamite. With construction proceeding from either side, the tunnel was less than a half-foot (0.1 m) off perfect alignment when it was holed-through on Christmas Day 1856. Opened to rail traffic in April of 1858, it was considered to be one of the engineering wonders of the modern world. Abandoned in 1944 when a larger, parallel tunnel was finished to accommodate increased rail traffic of war matériel, the original tunnel is now proposed for a rails-to-trails project. The 'new' tunnel, which was four feet (1.2 m) off alignment when originally constructed, is referred to as the Blue Ridge Tunnel, while the original is known as the Crozet Tunnel, after its remarkable engineer.
[edit] Amalgamation
The Blue Ridge Railroad ceased to exist once the route across the mountains was completed, becoming a part of the Virginia Central Railroad. In 1868, the Virginia Central was merged with another state-chartered railroad, the Covington and Ohio, to create the Chesapeake and Ohio Railway, which was subsequently sold to Collis P. Huntington; this helped complete Virginia's longterm dream of linking its navigable rivers of the Chesapeake Bay watershed with the Ohio River. What was once the Blue Ridge Railroad is now part of CSX Transportation.
