The Blue Ridge Railroad was incorporated by the Commonwealth of Virginia in 1849 with Claudius Crozet as chief engineer. Its purpose was to provide a crossing of the Blue Ridge Mountains for the Virginia Central Railroad into the Shenandoah Valley. The Virginia Board of Public Works, founded in 1816, supported numerous internal improvements in the state, owning part of the Virginia Central in stock as well as virtually all of the Blue Ridge Railroad. A civil engineer of considerable skill, Crozet had identified the eventual route as early as 1839. Rail service reached Charlottesville by 1851; westward, the railroad closely followed the alignment of the ancient Three Notch'd Road. To protect its investment and enable transportation, the State then incorporated and financed the Blue Ridge Railroad to accomplish the hard and expensive task of crossing the Blue Ridge mountain barrier to the west. Rather than attempting the more formidable Swift Run Gap, the state-owned Blue Ridge Railroad built over the mountains at the next major gap to the south, Rockfish Gap near Afton Mountain. Overseen by Crozet, the crossing was accomplished by building four tunnels, including the Blue Ridge Tunnel near the top of the pass. With construction proceeding from either side a decade before the invention of dynamite, the complex was dug through solid granite with only hand drills and black powder. The tunnel was less than off perfect alignment when it was holed through on December 29, 1856. When completed, the Blue Ridge Tunnel was the longest in the United States and one of the longest tunnels in the world, a remarkable feat of engineering. It opened to rail traffic in April 1858, and was considered to be one of the engineering wonders of the modern world.
During the American Civil War, the infantry under Confederate General Stonewall Jackson earned the nickname "foot cavalry" by traveling very quickly across the Blue Ridge Mountains, to the consternation of the Union leaders opposing them. To do this, Jackson used his detailed knowledge of the gaps in the Blue Ridge and also utilized the Blue Ridge Tunnel as a passageway for his troops.
Replacement
The Blue Ridge Railroad ceased to exist once the route across the mountains was completed, becoming a part of the Virginia Central Railroad. In 1868 the Virginia Central was merged with another state-chartered railroad, the Covington and Ohio Railroad, to create the Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad. This helped achieve Virginia's long-term goal of linking its navigable rivers of the Chesapeake Bay watershed with the Ohio River. The C&O Railroad was subsequently sold to Collis Potter Huntington. The C&O replaced the Blue Ridge Tunnel in 1944 with a larger, parallel tunnel to accommodate increased rail traffic of World War II materiel. The new tunnel - which was off alignment when constructed - is now referred to as the Blue Ridge Tunnel. It is still in use by CSX Transportation, the Buckingham Branch Railroad and Amtrak.
Future use
After the original tunnel was replaced, it became known as the Crozet Tunnel in honor of its remarkable engineer, for whom the nearby town of Crozet is named. It is currently planned to be used as part of a rail trail project. The Claudius Crozet Blue Ridge Tunnel Foundation secured a $749,000 grant through the Virginia Department of Transportation and the Commonwealth Transportation Board to begin Phase I of the project to reopen the long-closed tunnel with a bike path and hiking trail. Phase I will be a footpath from the former Afton rail depot to a concrete bulwark 700 feet into the tunnel. The first piece of the trail will begin and end on the east side of Afton Mountain. "This is definitely safe where we're going," district supervisor Allen Hale said in 2015. "But once you get to the tunnel and someone walks through here and gets all the way up, they're going to want to go in... The ultimate goal … is to have the tunnel open all the way through to the west side to the Blue Ridge Mountains and have a trail connection to U.S. Route 250 on the other side," Hale said... According to the News & Advance archives, the $450,000 required for Phase II has already been raised. Hale hopes to begin Phase II some time this year. The date for Phase III has yet to be set.
Mapping the tunnel
In the fall of 2017, a University of Virginiaassistant professor and two graduate students used a ground-based autonomous robot to scan and map the tunnel using LiDAR. The result was a three-dimensional map of the tunnel which can be used for restoration or construction projects in the future.
