West (Compass North) Portal: (
Satellite)
The original Google Maps satellite image that I accessed had "winter trees," and it was possible to trace the abandoned line. But when I access the links that Google Maps gives me, I get a summer time view. So I'm saving the original image that Google Maps gave me because I don't know how to get back to it.
The east portal is near the upper-left corner of this excerpt. The route is on the left, I included the stuff on the right to help locate the image.
The west portal is near the lower-right corner of this excerpt.
Eric Anderson
posted eight photos with the comment:
The Board Tree Tunnel, near Littleton, Wetzel County, West Virginia, was built between 1851 and 1858 by the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad on its main line between Baltimore, Maryland, and Wheeling, West Virginia, under the supervision of B&O chief engineer Benjamin Henry Latrobe, II. The 2,350-foot (720m) tunnel used a segmental cast iron lining system pioneered on the contemporaneous Kingwood Tunnel on the same line.
Workers were recruited from coal mines in the area to excavate the tunnel. The tunneling operations used black powder as explosive. About 30 deaths and 300 injuries occurred in the excavation of the Board Tree and Kingwood tunnels. The tunnel is now abandoned.
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Significance: The Board Tree Tunnel is one of the first major railroad tunnels in the United States. The tunnel along with the original B & 0 line from Baltimore to Wheeling is a tribute to three important 19th century engineers; Benjaman Latrobe, Wendell Bollman, and Albert Fink. Of note is iron arching found in the tunnel. No date is given for its placement, but another tunnel on the same line (Kingwood Tunnel, HAER WV-16) used the same type of prefabricated segmental iron arch in its construction during 1849-57.
The tunnel was between two watersheds.
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| 1960 Littleton Quad @ 24,000 |
But Google Maps labels both of them as Pennsylvania Fork Fish Creek. After chasing blue lines around the map for quite a while, I determined that the lower Fish Creek by Littleton should be labeled West Virginia Fork Fish Creek.
A lower resolution topo confirms that the creek through Littleton is the West Virginia Fork, but it does not show the tunnel.
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| 1949 Clarksburg Quad @ 250,000 |
Eric's post taught me that what I thought was a branch in
Moundsville was the original mainline through the mountains.
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1949 Clarksburg Quad @ 250,000
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A 1956 version shows us the tunnel, but it doesn't show Littleton. I don't envy cartographers having to decide what to include on a map in these scales. Fortunately, railroad routes get a priority. I was looking at newer topo maps to try to find when this route was abandoned and to find what replaced it. But this route still existed in the most recent topo map, 1998.
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1956 Clarksburg Quad @ 250,000
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I had studied the
Moundsville depot just a few hours before studying this tunnel. I had assumed that the route that went up the Grave Creek Valley was a branch because the route along the river was double tracked, and the Grave Creek Valley was abandoned. Fortunately, I noticed Grave Creek on a topo map while I was trying to figure out the watersheds in this area. I now know that the "branch" was in fact the original 1850s mainline. This made curious about which routes made this route obsolete. So I looked at West Virginia in the B&O maps that I have accumulated.
1878: This map has just this original route between Grafton and Wheeling.
1934: The route south of Moundsville along the east side of the Ohio River had been built down past Huntington.
1958: But it was probably the route between Clarksburg and Brooklyn Jct. that made the original route obsolete.
In regard to the abandoning of a portion of the original Main Line of the B&O that included the Board Tree Tunnel: Board Tree's clearances were too tight for the larger freight cars being built in the early 1960s and thus taller cars had to be routed around the tunnel via the Short Line (Clarksburg to New Martinsville) or another route altogether. Secondly, Board Tree Tunnel is the crest of the grade leaving the watershed of the West Virginia Fork of Fish Creek; the base of that grade is at Bellton, where the B&O crossed the Pennsylvania Fork of Fish Creek, and then an uphill grade along Four Mile Run to Welling Tunnel, where the grade crested again, then down grade to Cameron and west. The grades were another hindrance to the limited freight traffic that still was routed from Wheeling to Fairmont and Grafton; during the steam era helpers were often used on heavier trains between Cameron and Glover Gap if not Benwood to Fairmont. The section between Board Tree and Welling Tunnels was abandoned in 1963; freight service was maintained to Cameron from Benwoodd and to Littleton from Fairmont.
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