When America was younger, it had to reinvent itself to grow. The 4-lane “super highway” was a new development just before World War II. The first super highway was the Pennsylvania Turnpike. It was built for just over $61 million and with a lot of new ideas and engineering. There was only one problem. It had 7 tunnels bored through the Appalachian Mountains. They were narrow and made for a railroad. Just a couple decades after the first super highway was built, they had learned a lot. But, the narrow tunnels only had enough room for two, opposing lanes. This caused traffic backups of up to 5 miles.
They needed to get more traffic through the tunnels at the mountains. Four of the tunnels had a companion tunnel blasted beside the first. The other three were bypassed in favor of going “over” the mountain instead of through it.
The result is 13.5 miles of abandoned turnpike, next to the new turnpike. It includes over 1.7 miles of tunnel, a travel service stop and 2 narrow, parallel stretches of overgrown road. It’s pretty cool, actually. It’s called the “Abandoned Pennsylvania Turnpike”.
I took a quick trip to the longest stretch of abandoned highway in the United States. It was, also, the first superhighway. Today, it is a bike trail managed by an organization called – Pike2Bike. It isn’t officially open to the public. But as Pike2Bike says, “Unofficially, it is visited by hundreds”.
It is an interesting piece of “Abandoned Americana”
