The Pennsylvania Turnpike and the American Highway

On October first, nineteen forty, a toll road opened across the Pennsylvania mountains that most Americans had never seen anything like. The Pennsylvania Turnpike ran one hundred sixty miles from Irwin, east of Pittsburgh, to Carlisle, west of Harrisburg, crossing the Allegheny ridges through seven tunnels bored through solid rock. It had four lanes, no traffic lights, no intersections, no grade crossings.

Engineers called it a superhighway. Drivers who had spent their lives navigating narrow, winding mountain roads could suddenly move at sustained speeds of sixty miles per hour through country that had taken days to cross a generation earlier. The turnpike had unlikely origins.

The route followed the bed of an abandoned South Pennsylvania Railroad right-of-way, a project begun by William Vanderbilt and Andrew Carnegie in the eighteen eighties and abandoned halfway through when J. P. Morgan forced a settlement between competing rail interests.

The tunnels that railroad had begun were still there in the nineteen thirties, half-finished, when New Deal federal money and desperate Pennsylvania employment needs gave the project new life. More than thirty thousand men built the turnpike in less than two years. It opened on time, under budget, carrying more traffic in its first six months than engineers had projected for its first year.

The lesson was not lost on the federal government, which was already thinking about a national highway system. Dwight Eisenhower, who had crossed the country in a military convoy in nineteen nineteen and experienced the agony of American roads firsthand, visited the Pennsylvania Turnpike and understood what it demonstrated. The Federal-Aid Highway Act of nineteen fifty-six, which created the Interstate Highway System, owed something direct to what Pennsylvania had built across its mountains.

The turnpike today runs three hundred sixty miles across the full width of the state. The tolls, which started at one dollar and fifty cents for the full trip in nineteen forty, are somewhat higher now.