Roseville Tunnel

Roseville Tunnel is a 1,024-foot (312 m) two-track railroad tunnel on the Lackawanna Cut-Off in Byram Township, Sussex County, New Jersey. It is on a straight section of railroad between mileposts 51.6 and 51.8 (83 km), about 6 miles (9.7 km) west of Port Morris Junction. The tunnel was built between 1908 and 1911 by the Delaware, Lackawanna & Western Railroad (DL&W) as part of the Lackawanna Cut-Off, an immense, spare-no-expense project intended to create the straightest, flattest route practicable for its main line through the mountains of northwestern New Jersey. The contractor was David W. Flickwir of Roanoke, Virginia.

Originally, the DL&W had planned to have a cut, not a tunnel, at this location. At 140 feet (43 m) deep, it would have been the deepest on the Cut-Off. But in October 1909, anticlinal rock was encountered, described as "bastard granite", which contractors said was "so brittle and soft that you could scoop it up by the handful. It was white in color and looked much like Roquefort cheese." The fear was that this decayed rock could not be relied upon to provide sufficiently rigid support for a cut. As a result, Assistant Chief Engineer Wheaton recommended to President Truesdale that a tunnel be drilled instead, and Truesdale concurred, with work to bore a tunnel starting in December 1909. Ultimately, some 35,000 cubic yards of material were removed to create the bore.

Roseville Tunnel opened on December 24, 1911, and permitted a 70 mph (113 km/hr) speed limit. In 1958, the DL&W single-tracked the line in anticipation of a merger with the Erie Railroad. Its successor, the Erie Lackawanna Railway (EL), shifted the remaining track in the tunnel several feet north to boost clearance for high-and-wide railroad cars. In 1976, Conrail assumed operations of the EL, but would operate the line for less than three years, placing the Cut-Off out of service in January 1979. After a protracted effort to prevent the rail from being removed failed, Conrail pulled up the tracks during the summer of 1984 and subsequently sold the right-of-way to two different land developers. The State of New Jersey acquired the right-of-way in 2001 and in 2011 NJ Transit began re-construction on the line.

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