A Second Tunnel Through Tuscarora

The Pennsylvania Turnpike was built across only a little more than two miles of Huntingdon County, at the county's southern tip in Dublin Township. Half of the mile-long tunnel through Tuscarora Mountain lay in that stretch.

The tunnel was older than the highway. In 1883 the South Pennsylvania Railroad, backed by William H. Vanderbilt and Pittsburgh steel men unhappy with the Pennsylvania Railroad's rates, let contracts for a line with nine tunnels. Pennsylvania Railroad president George Roberts vowed to "smash the South Penn like a bubble." With the road 60 percent complete, J. P. Morgan brought the work to a halt, and the South Penn was abandoned.

Fifty years later its right of way became the turnpike's route. During construction the East Broad Top's Shade Gap Branch carried an estimated 20,000 tons of concrete and bridge steel to Shade Gap and Neelyton in 1938 alone. The road opened on October 1, 1940.

The tunnels became the bottleneck. Each was only two lanes wide, and by 1960 the turnpike carried more than 31 million vehicles a year. Between 1966 and 1968, Tuscarora, Kittatinny and Blue Mountain became the last turnpike tunnels to get a second bore. The original eastbound tube was then renovated, and each tunnel carried two lanes of traffic going one way.

When the county's engineering sites were recorded for the federal Historic American Engineering Record in 1991, the double tunnel measured 5,326 feet. The southern, eastbound tube dated to the 1880s. The northern one was built in the late 1960s.

Checked 2026-10-31 · County histories and primary sources, read in full

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