The Moffat Tunnel: Denver's Hole Through the Divide
Near Winter Park, Colorado
When the Moffat Tunnel opened on February twenty-sixth, nineteen twenty-eight, it was the longest railroad tunnel in the Western Hemisphere, piercing the Continental Divide for six point two miles through solid granite. It was named for David Moffat, a Denver banker and railroad promoter who spent much of his personal fortune trying to build a direct rail route from Denver westward over the mountains, cutting out the long, roundabout detours through Pueblo or Cheyenne that the existing railroads required. Moffat died in nineteen eleven, years before the tunnel that bears his name was completed, never knowing if his dream would be finished.
The original rail crossing had been over Rollins Pass, a high and brutally exposed route that suffered crippling snowdrifts every winter, requiring constant clearing and causing frequent shutdowns. The tunnel replaced that grinding mountain crossing with a straight shot six hundred feet below the summit of the divide. At the west portal, the elevation stands at about nine thousand two hundred feet, and trains emerge into the Fraser Valley air having crossed beneath the backbone of the continent without a switchback.
The tunnel cut one hundred seventy-three miles off the trip between Denver and Salt Lake City. Today the same bore carries both the California Zephyr, which stops at Fraser, and the seasonal Winter Park Express, still threading passengers under the divide exactly as Moffat envisioned a century ago.
