Ten bridges and two tunnels in five miles of the Little Juniata

Between the village of Spruce Creek and the borough of Birmingham the Pennsylvania Railroad's main line follows the Little Juniata River, which the nomination calls the path of least resistance through the mountains. From the first survey, the ground left the engineers little choice about where the track could run. The result is a 5.15-mile stretch, between Conrail mile markers 213.73 and 218.88, on which the railroad crosses the river ten times on stone arch bridges and passes through a spur of Tussey Mountain in two parallel tunnels. The nomination, prepared at the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission in November 1989 and drawing on Nancy Shedd's 1988 report for the Historic American Engineering Record, calls it the most heavily built section of the line in bridges and tunnels per mile.

The first tunnel came with the original single track. It is 1,151 feet long, brick arched and 32 feet wide, and the nomination dates it to 1850. Lytle's 1876 county history says the opening through the mountain was made in June 1849, eleven months after the first pick was struck into it, and that premature blasts caused several serious accidents there, one of which killed a man. The 1991 county engineering inventory adds that the hand digging and blasting were carried out largely by Irish immigrants. When the railroad four-tracked the main line in 1900 it bored a second tunnel, 1,075 feet long, through the same mountain. The western openings of the two were joined in a double portal, while the eastern portal of the 1850 tunnel keeps its original appearance.

The bridges are not the originals. The nomination says the first bridges on this right of way were iron, and that the reason for replacing them in stone is not certain; the form's guess is that the iron was deteriorating as locomotives grew heavier. The bridge dates in the nomination's table run from 1886 to 1902. Those built before 1892 had to be widened when the extra tracks came. The nomination puts the last major reinforcement with steel and concrete at 1953, though its own table lists major repairs on six of the bridges between 1958 and 1963. Alterations made before 1940 count toward the district's integrity rather than against it.

The nomination reached the National Park Service on February 7, 1990, and the district was judged significant at the statewide level for engineering and transportation, with a period of significance from 1850 to 1939. The longest of the ten bridges, at mile 215.06, has five arches and runs 298 feet.

The railroad's route along the Little Juniata must have tormented the original engineers and contractors and those who followed during the four tracking.National Register of Historic Places nomination, Pennsylvania Railroad District (reference 90000393), Pennsylvania Railroad District, section 8 page 2 (PDF page 6) · character 9,188 of the scanned text

Checked 2026-09-05 · National Register of Historic Places nomination, read in full

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