Entering Stone
A dark, craggy opening carved into solid rock grew larger and darker as I drew close. Mythic portals to the netherworld flashed to mind. On entering, the air felt like a chill breath. Dripping water echoed in rhythm with my heartbeat. It was only a railroad tunnel abandoned for the better part of a century, but you can’t separate tunnels from mystery. They taunt the imagination.
At once exhilarating, creepy, and inducing claustrophobia, there’s an irresistible fascination in concealed travel through a rockface or beneath the earth’s surface. No doubt I become energized in defiance of natural barriers, but there’s also a haunting quality when the sky disappears and the mind ineluctably searches for light at the other end.
Cut in the early 1870s by Pennsylvania coal miners using picks and explosives, the 235-foot-long Shepaug Valley Railroad tunnel in Washington, Connecticut is bored through the layered and tilted rock strata of Steep Rock Ridge. Since it has a curve, there’s no light visible from the other end as you approach on the old railbed, now a hiking trail. Instead, the opening peers out like a black, glowering eye embedded in the tree-covered hillside. Once inside the dim interior, a greenish light tinted by summer vegetation glowed from the far end. There was just enough illumination to reveal jagged, slanted rock that made it seem as if the passage was almost natural, that I’d entered the very contours of the planet.
Giving a Hoot
I couldn’t help but loudly “hoot” like a deranged owl to test the tunnel’s echo, a habit acquired at age five when my father drove me through the mile-and-a-half-long Holland Tunnel under the Hudson River from Manhattan to New Jersey. A frightened child distracted by hooting, my tears quickly turned to laughter. Ever after, my family would hoot, sing, or tap on the car’s ceiling whenever entering atunnel, sounds that chased away evil spirits of fear.
With the Wilbur Cross Parkway a frequent route of household travel, most of the singing, hooting, and tapping of my childhood occurred in the New Haven area as we barreled 1,200 feet into the traprock massif of West Rock through what is now called Heroes Tunnel. Opened in 1949, the twin-tubes are faced in stone with Romanesque arch openings lending them a stern, classical beauty. A straight shot with light at the end coming quickly, I learned to enjoy the ride, our raucous rituals of passage turning trepidation to joy.
Dread of trolls and collapsing walls have faded with adulthood, but tunnels still feel mysterious, places apart. They are insular, curiosities of engineering, construction and transit. More than any other architecture, they focus my attention with gunsight acuity. Once inside, the objective is clear and inescapable. Still, as much as I now enjoy them, there’s relief on reaching the other end.
But even after exiting, I often find myself metaphorically tunneling. I think about journeys I’ve taken or plan on taking. Sometimes I recall passages from one phase of life to the next. Practical, material solutions to connect one place to another, tunnels can take us to unexplored regions of the mind, if we let them.
Tunnel Types
What exactly is a tunnel? How does it differ from an underpass, a passageway, or a conduit? Webster’s defines a “tunnel” broadly as “a covered passageway . . . through or under an obstruction.” There’s no length or depth requirement and there’s no distinction between a natural or humanmade obstruction. The same dictionary seems to define an “underpass” as a species of tunnel (“a grade separation ., . . . as with a tunnel”), while a tunnel is a particular kind of “passageway” (a way that allows passage to or from a place), and a “conduit” is usually a pipe or tube used to carry fluids or electrical wiring. I find such definitions frustrating as one meaning blends into another. Tunnels seem to be in the beholder’s eye.
In practical terms, tunnels are humanmade passages with four principal characteristics. First and foremost, they have roofs and preferably sidewalls. They pass through or below a barrier and take you from one place to another. Lastly, they need be at least a little longer than wide.
Many tunnels accommodate pedestrians, but the best known are fitted for trains, or cars and trucks. Some are conduits for conveyance of utilities or water. Here in Connecticut, we may lack the length of New York City’s subway tunnel network, the spooky history of Parisian catacombs, or the grandeur of the Chunnel connecting England with France, but there are nevertheless scores of tunnels designed for a wide variety of purposes. They may connect indoor or outside spaces, facilitate business or recreation, be brightly lit or pitch black, active or abandoned. They’ve never been counted or cataloged, and no one knows them all.
Pedestrian Passage
Pedestrian tunnels allow for the most casual enjoyment and careful observation because foot travel is relatively slow, even when we’re in a hurry. Passage under New Haven’s train station treats you to shiny curvaceous sides sparkling with reflected light, while the connection between the Legislative Office Building and Capitol in Hartford offers walls decorated with history lessons. Many pedestrian tunnels are for recreation, like the ones made of stone that offer access to the beach and a way through the pavilion at Rock Neck State Park in East Lyme. Another example is the boxy concrete passage that carries the Farmington River Trail beneath State Route 4 in Unionville, beautifully painted with a mural featuring variety of objects including a dogwalker, deer, submarine, and sky.
Some pedestrian tunnels have been repurposed from other uses, like the Shepaug tunnel or the one actor William Gillette built for his narrow-gauge railroad in what is now Gillette Castle State Park in East Haddam. Others have concurrent uses like the one in New Britain’s Fairview Cemetery that allows both cars and foot traffic to pass beneath the CTfastrack line.
Motor Vehicles
Heroes Tunnel through West Rock may come first to mind when contemplating tunnels strictly for motor vehicles, but there’s one on the sunken portion of I-84 in Hartford near its junction with I-91. It supports a plaza and roads above, but to the motorist below it feels more like an overgrown underpass than a true tunnel. Made of concrete, New Haven’s downtown Pitkin Street Tunnel has been described as “like being inside a cement accordion.” Once a shortcut for drivers hurrying from Elm to State Street, this passage beneath federal and city government institutions is now well guarded against intruders due to terrorism fears.
Of course, there are grade separations between roads and railroads throughout the state that feel tunnel-like. But Tunnel Road in Vernon has the real deal. Built between 1846 and 1849 of native sandstone using hand tools and oxen, at 108 feet it’s said to be the longest keystone arch tunnel in the state. Designed to carry Connecticut’s first east-west railway over the road, the round arch openings composed of large stone blocks with wingwalls remain impressive even more than a century-and-a-half later. While locomotives are long gone, the railbed is still a transportation corridor, now lined with trees and used by pedestrians and cyclists as part of the Hop River Trail State Park.
Trains
Tunnels on active rail lines seem mysterious. It’s probably because they are away from roads and seldom seen. They lie on freight routes, and visitors are forbidden for safety reasons.
Chopped through a rocky bluff along the Quinebaug River known as Bundy Hill, the Taft Tunnel in Lisbon is 300 feet long and was the first completed common carrier tunnel in the country. Still used by the Providence and Worcester Railroad, the uneven opening looks like the dark maw of a horror film monster with the jagged rock walls and ceiling seeming like broken and blackened teeth. When I stuck my head inside, the drip of water reverberated in the darkness, and the scent of diesel exhaust from a recent train hung in the humid air.
Two spectral figures are purported to wander the 3,580-foot-long Pequabuck Tunnel completed through Plymouth’s Sylvan Hill in 1910. They may be workers hurt in a 1908 cave-in, escapees from a nearby cemetery, or the ghosts of old-time conductors. I followed the trail alongside the tracks, but all I encountered was a clutch of teenagers testing the echo with expletives. Unlike the Taft and Shepaug tunnels, the Pequabuck is lined with steel reinforced concrete fitted into the rock. The opening has a round arch with a simple rectangular entablature above. It’s a straight shot with a tiny lens of light visible at the far end. The concrete walls provide an excellent substrate for colorful graffiti, and orange water from rusting steel rebar was pooled near the entrance. The concrete was spalling in places revealing a coarse texture, and in other spots lime leached from the walls and ceiling leaving an abstract flocking pattern dotted with tiny stalactites. The tunnel was beautiful in its decrepitude.
Conduits
While conduits generally suggest water pipes and wires, some can accommodate people. A block from my Collinsville home there’s a tunnel that runs under a road between two buildings. It contains service connections between what was once a factory building and the company office. It’s a bit cramped and a little creepy with years of dust and cobwebs, but I’ve been inside partway. In fact, a person could crawl through the entire length if so inclined. No doubt there are many other such tunnels around the state waiting to be explored.
When a tunnel is an aqueduct or large diameter pipe filled with water, exploring is impossible. But sometimes water presents a different kind of opportunity. Years ago, I canoed the last two miles of Hartford’s Park River to its confluence with the Connecticut. In the mid twentieth century, the river was buried underground in a conduit that is as much as two-and-a-half stories tall. Although in high water the trip is hazardous, low water invited a peculiar paddle beneath the city in an eerie, dank world of forever darkness blacker than the deepest night. As light from the entrance faded, even my powerful headlamp showed a weak, candlelike reflection on the water and smooth concrete walls. Everything seemed slowed down in the inky atmosphere, every movement felt deliberate. When at last I reached the Connecticut River, the burst of space and light with the city skyline behind me was startling, exhilarating.
Here and Gone
Tunnels aren’t forever. Abandonment and sometimes intentional destruction await those losing their function to changes in technology, transportation advances, or societal needs. Newtown’s Municipal Center once had a series of tunnels connecting buildings on what was then Fairfield Hills State Hospital, a psychiatric facility existing from 1931 to 1995. The underground passages enabled easy movement of staff, patients, and equipment regardless of the weather. When conversion to municipal offices began in 2009, the unneeded tunnels were considered an attractive nuisance and destroyed, filled in, or sealed off.
Not far north of the municipal offices, in the Hawleyville section of town, are a couple of abandoned railroad tunnels that run parallel to each other. The first is carved into solid rock and was built in 1840. Long abandoned, it’s awash in water and partly broken down. The second tunnel, lined with concrete, was built later 1881 by a competing railroad. The first tunnel was abandoned in 1911 when the owner straightened and double tracked the line via a rock cut running above the second tunnel. Sometime in the 1940s, this tunnel was also abandoned when the tracks were discontinued. The first tunnel now looks like the entrance to a cave, while the second, with its well-proportioned rounded arch is sadly empty, a portal to nowhere visited only by the intrepid, some of whom carry cans of spray paint.
Beckoning Tunnels
Tunnels feed the imagination. Something about them beckons. As far back as the Book of Job we read about channels “cut among the rocks” enabling the eye to see “every precious thing.” And it seems we are still looking, as if through a telescope, for something special and precious on that far side.
The age of tunnel building isn’t over. The state transportation department has long been contemplating widening Heroes Tunnel or constructing additional tubes to accommodate safety improvements and more traffic. Congressman John Larson has proposed about six miles of tunnels to bury much of I-91 and I-84 in Hartford at a cost of billions. Some call the plan visionary; others see it as a fool’s errand.
Tunnels literally take us from one place to another, but in imagination they offer passage to much more—perhaps a life transition, escape, or rebirth. Concrete or ethereal, they remain the stuff of dreams.
