The Abandoned Pennsylvania Turnpike

A Beautiful Mistake
By Tom Roe

Part II - Zombie Turnpike

It’s 2018. I’m standing at the entrance of an abandoned tunnel. The rain and humidity fog up my glasses, making it hard to get a complete view of the arched entrance towering above me. I scamper inside the tunnel and that’s when I hear it. The music the tunnels make in the rain. A constant dripping and flowing ensemble. Water trickling down rusted out pipes and cascading down, then off the edge of collapsed metal stairs. An echo in the distance of droplets meeting puddles; then puddles becoming larger puddles. A chorus. The rain makes the tunnels alive again.

I find a place to set down my gear bag and setup my camera and tripod. I walk over to a door that had been caught in the middle of a fight over whether or not to keep it open. It seems the door had lost. Inside I find a pool of water- the final resting place of millions of tiny raindrops; filtering through not only the walls and ceilings of the tunnel, but its history as well. I walk back outside and look at the vents above the entrance. I can see inside. But can I get there? The place seems gutted. Killed off long ago by time, scrappers, and vandals. But here it is, still calling people to it. And here I am, on my first visit to the tunnels. I take out my flashlight and walk about fifty feet inside. The concrete is rust-stained. There is structural damage in the ceiling. Graffiti lines the walls. There’s a stagnant smell of dirt and decay in the air. But despite all that, it seems to be fighting on. After all these years of decay, it’s still here. This place is like a shell of its former self, but it’s been brought back with a new purpose. Almost like a zombie.

I walk back over to my camera gear and get to work. This place has a story to tell.

When we last left our turnpike fiasco we found that after being unhappy with the rates he was being charged by the Pennsylvania Railroad, Andrew Carnegie teamed up with Vanderbilt to construct a railroad that would eventually connect the Steel City with the State Capitol of Harrisburg. This effort proved a failure. Under the pressure of stiff competition from the Pennsylvania Railroad eventually led Vanderbilt and his business partners came to the conclusion that it would be cheaper to simply buy a competing railroad.

The project sat dormant, every so often being resurrected in plan form only, then killed off again shortly after. In 1893, similarly named Southern Pennsylvania Railway (owned by the Pennsylvania Railroad) obtained the title to the right of way East of Mount Dallas, which includes our little stretch of abandonment. They held the title until 1937. Which brings us to 1904 - the very last time any piece of Vanderbilt’s Folly changed hands while still being intended to be used as a railroad. The remaining right of way (to the West of Mount Dallas) was bought by the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, renaming again, finally, and for the last time, to the Fulton, Bedford, and Somerset Railroad. Which was the perfect name, because no railroad was ever built and the project was sold and was eventually reunited with its more Easterly better half.

For 34 years the project sat. Unwanted. Unloved. But the worst financial disaster in American history was about to change the shape of the country forever. And in the process send this old railroad grade on a trajectory that would literally change the face of America.

In August 1929, the stock market crashed, decimating the US dollar and forcing 13 million people out of work by 1932. America was largely divided - most lived in large cities, but a sizable amount lived in clusters of rural towns, or straight up the middle of nowhere. Both generally disconnected from each other, having little to no way of quickly moving between large population centers and rural communities. However, once the economic recovery began to pick up steam around 1933, a sort of Great American Diaspora began to take shape.

Wherever people were, they wanted to be somewhere else. Driven by a new and recovering economy, people were traveling, moving, sightseeing, camping, and road tripping their way across the country. But America’s infrastructure (last extensively financed in the early-mid 1920s) was not keeping up with this burst of migration. Federal roads and highways programs had their funds diverted during the depression and were virtually dead.

Dirt roads were not only common, but standard in most places outside of cities, and in cities traffic jams were so bad, it was usually easier to simply walk to where you needed to go. Traveling was arduous in most rural areas, especially in Winter and Spring. But, this massive exodus from cities was beginning to fuel an economic explosion, and Pennsylvania saw an opportunity to not only cash in, but fundamentally change the country in the process.

American highways would take lessons learned from the German Autobahn. However, while the German superhighway’s purpose was to bypass cities, America’s roads would connect them, and Pennsylvania had an ace up its sleeve.

Vanderbilt’s Folly.

That’s right. Our expensive failure of a railroad grade was Pennsylvania’s biggest asset when it came to building super highways. In the 1930’s the only way to drive from Lancaster to Pittsburgh was Lincoln highway- America’s first transcontinental highway. But this was more of an ad-hoc roadway. Sections of the roadway across the Appalachian Mountains were old and poorly made, being prone to closures and unsafe driving conditions due to its twisting, turning mountainous route. But what if PA could make a newer, better road that literally tunneled straight through these mountains. And what if those tunnels already existed?

Constructing a highway through the mostly empty wilderness between Harrisburg and Pittsburgh would have been a major obstacle, but if the state instead used the already planned and graded South PA, they could build a road that connected a large portion of the state’s population for comparatively little money and time. So that’s exactly what they did.

While planning for the route of the highway and how to construct it started in the early 1930’s, the state didn’t purchase the old railroad grade until 1937. The very first section to be completed of America’s first superhighway would also be the biggest challenge. On October 27, 1938 construction began on the Pennsylvania Turnpike, which would first run between Carlisle and Irwin. And almost all of it was Vanderbilt’s Folly.

But, not everything will go according to plan, and some hard decisions along with some past mistakes will cause trouble for our new superhighway that would later prove to be insurmountable.

Building a road is one thing, but with this road in particular, how would the builders overcome all the obstacles that stood in the way? Would the public support such a monumental project? How would such a large project with such a massive budget succeed? Find out in part three - An Unpopular Success.

Hey! Thanks for reading. This is the story of how the Abandoned Pennsylvania Turnpike came to be. It is not a complete history or compendium. It is meant to present the story of the abandoned turnpike section in general terms and leaves out or glosses over many noteworthy events, mostly pertaining to the turnpike as a whole and the history of roads and highways in PA and the US, as well as names of people and specific events. This is in an effort to present a cohesive story about just a small portion of the turnpike that now sits abandoned between Breezewood and PA Route 915. If something is left out or simplified for the purposes of this story, it is intentional.