The backbreaking construction of this masterwork began in 1850. Designed by the exceptional Claudius Crozet, it was one of four tunnels in his brilliant scheme to get trains across the Blue Ridge Mountains to the Ohio River Valley. And there it now stands, a gothic monolith hiding among forest oaks, hemlocks and snowy briars, looking like it’s holding up the mountain—a tribute not only to Crozet’s intelligence, but to the tenacious Irish immigrant workers and slaves who made it happen according to the build-for-eternity ethic of the day.

My husband has a "morning workout" friend who had hiked to the tunnel, so on a January Saturday when I asked, “Where do you want to hike today?” he answered with gusto, “Let’s find the Blue Ridge Tunnel.” And with the help of an online blog or two and a carload of gracious UVA students, we did it without wasting any time getting lost. West of Crozet (named for the illustrious engineer), we headed to the hamlet of Afton and started walking west on a trail running alongside the present CSX rail line. Only in the mountains of Virginia would one find, even in the dead of winter, a storybook grassy path leading to an industrial ruin. It’s not far, just round a bend—the eastern entrance to the Blue Ridge Tunnel, looking like a gaping granite yawn, just as it did when it opened in 1858, minus the rails. Water falls across the left side of the entrance as if the whole mountainside were weeping across a huge open mouth, making the path an over-the-shoe rivulet, and the tunnel floor a lake. I understand from accounts that the water level further inside is waist-deep. Crozet deliberately sloped the tunnel 56 feet to the east so water would drain toward the lower Afton side while smoke from the steam trains would waft to the west, out the Waynesboro side. Faced with serious seepage during tunnel construction, Crozet devised a cast iron pipe siphon, almost 2,000 feet long, purported to be the longest in the world at the time.