Blue Ridge Tunnel: Longest in the World

Punching a railroad through the Blue Ridge Mountains took seven years, hundreds of Irish immigrants and hundreds of enslaved Black laborers working toward each other from opposite ends of a mountain.

French engineer Claudius Crozet, a veteran of Napoleon's campaign in Russia and Virginia's former state engineer, designed the tunnel and began boring in eighteen fifty. Workers used hand drills, pickaxes, and black powder to advance through granite, dealing with cholera outbreaks, fights between crews, and relentless personal criticism of Crozet's methods. In December of eighteen fifty-six, the two headings met with remarkable precision. The tunnel opened to rail traffic on April thirteenth, eighteen fifty-eight.

At four thousand two hundred and seventy-three feet, it was the longest railroad tunnel in the United States at the time of completion. Today it is a public trail through the mountain, and you can walk the route that once carried the Virginia Central Railroad across the Blue Ridge.