A Colorado Railroad Built America's Highest Tunnel to Win a Race, Then Went Bankrupt Keeping It Open

There is a stone wall in Colorado, over thirty feet high and longer than a football field, built without a drop of mortar, standing at eleven thousand feet on the side of a mountain, holding up a railroad that has not carried a train since nineteen ten. Above the wall, under the Continental Divide, is a tunnel. Both ends have fallen in. For the twenty-nine years it was open it was the highest railroad tunnel in North America, and in one month of eighteen ninety-five it killed six men, four of them at once, inside it. The engineer was found afterward with his hand still on the throttle. He had not been trying to get out. He had been trying to drive through a wall of fallen rock, on purpose. IF YOU ARE GOING UP THERE As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. Colorado Atlas and Gazetteer (DeLorme) - County Road 839 out of Pitkin, the Hancock trailhead above St. Elmo and the whole Alpine Tunnel Historic District are on it, and none of them have signal: https://amzn.to/4dlwd04 WHERE IT IS Alpine Tunnel Historic District, on the Continental Divide between Gunnison and Chaffee counties, Colorado, at about 11,500 feet. From the west: County Road 839 out of Pitkin follows the old grade toward the tunnel. The road washed out a few years ago and has not been rebuilt, so the last three miles are on foot along the railbed, past the Palisades wall, to the station complex and the collapsed west portal. From the east: the old grade from Hancock, above St. Elmo on Chalk Creek, is a hiking trail to the collapsed east portal. High clearance to reach Hancock. Both portals are collapsed. There is no way into the tunnel and nobody should try. The season is roughly July to September; the pass is under snow the rest of the year. Buena Vista is pronounced BYOO-nuh Vista by the people who live there. Gunnison is GUN-ih-sun. Leadville is LED-vil. A NOTE ON THE IMAGES The research and the script are mine, from primary records and archives, and the sources are listed below. Where no photograph of a place survives, and for this channel that is often, the images are period material from elsewhere rather than the place itself. SOURCES Colorado Encyclopedia, "Alpine Tunnel Historic District" Joy Jackson, Salida Regional Library, "Ghosts of the Alpine Tunnel," The Mountain Mail, Salida, parts one and two National Register of Historic Places, Alpine Tunnel Historic District, 1996 The Carbonate Chronicle, March 1884, on the Woodstock slide The Denver Post, June 1895 American-Rails.com, Denver, South Park and Pacific Railroad Colorado Central Magazine, "The Denver, South Park and Pacific Railroad" Legends of America, "Alpine Tunnel, Colorado" Denver Public Library Western History Collection, Louis C. McClure photographs IF YOU WERE THERE If you have walked the grade to the tunnel from either side, if your family worked the South Park line or lived in Pitkin or St. Elmo in the years it ran, or if you know the names of the three men who died alongside Martenis in June 1895, I would like to hear it. Comment or write to [email protected]. Old Alignment. Abandoned American roads, railroads and infrastructure. New video every other day. #alpinetunnel #coloradohistory #abandonedrailroad