The $15 Million Mistake: America's Most Expensive Railroad Failure

Eight stone piers stand in the Susquehanna River at Marysville, Pennsylvania, just upstream from Harrisburg. They were finished in 1885, and no bridge has ever rested on them. No train has ever crossed them. Follow the line they point toward and you find nine tunnels bored into the Allegheny ridges, miles of graded roadbed lost in the woods, and not one rail ever laid on any of it. This is the South Pennsylvania Railroad, the abandoned railroad that people in these counties nicknamed Vanderbilt's Folly. In 1882 William Henry Vanderbilt, who controlled the New York Central, bought a dormant 1854 charter for a song and took the survey to Andrew Carnegie in Pittsburgh. The plan was a two hundred mile line running south of the Pennsylvania Railroad's monopoly main line: out of Harrisburg, across the Susquehanna at Marysville, west through the Cumberland Valley past Carlisle and Shippensburg, then straight through the ridges toward Pittsburgh. Thirty to nearly fifty miles shorter than the route it was built to beat, a maximum grade of two percent, twenty-six miles without a curve. Carnegie and his friends put up five million dollars, Vanderbilt five million, the Rockefellers a million more. The engineering was no bluff. Surveyors covered nearly a thousand square miles of mountain country with some five thousand miles of survey lines before construction began in 1883. Railroad tunnels were driven at Tuscarora, Sideling Hill, Rays Hill, the Allegheny summit, Negro Mountain, Quemahoning and Laurel Hill, the Sideling Hill bore alone running 6,662 feet through solid Appalachian rock. Thousands of laborers, among them Italians, Hungarians and African Americans, worked for a dollar and twenty-five cents a day under some hundred and fifty subcontractors. By late 1885 at least four and a half miles of tunnel had been excavated. In one mountain the two headings were 394 feet apart. A few more weeks and they would have met in the dark. Then, on September 12, 1885, with roughly sixty percent of it finished, work stopped forever. The easy answer is money: about ten million of the fifteen had gone into the rock, and Vanderbilt was sixty-four and unwell. But the timeline does not fit. Crews were still driving headings. The piers were complete. This was not a project running out of money. It was stopped cold from the outside, by one day's conversation aboard a steam yacht in New York harbor and by a clause in the Pennsylvania constitution of 1874 that made the only buyer capable of finishing it an illegal one. That is why it was never built, and why this half-finished railroad sat untouched for fifty years. What remains is some of the strangest forgotten infrastructure in the eastern United States. The piers still stand. In Buchanan State Forest, Fulton County, the Railroad Arch Trail leads to a stone culvert nearly two hundred feet long, laid up by masons from Sicily, still carrying a tributary of Oregon Creek under an embankment that has never felt a train. On Negro Mountain in Somerset County the unfinished bore runs 706 feet into the rock out of an intended 1,100, sealed and state owned, exactly as far as the men got. Across Cumberland, Fulton, Bedford, Somerset and Westmoreland counties a raised bench of earth runs through the woods, too straight and too level to be natural. Then in the 1930s someone finally understood what that grade was, which is how six of those tunnels opened in October 1940 carrying cars. If abandoned infrastructure and urban exploration history is your thing, subscribe and stay to the end for that turn. THE UNFINISHED MAP - documentaries on forgotten, bypassed, sealed and unfinished American infrastructure. New maps, new scars, every week. Chapters: 00:00 Eight Piers Holding Up Nothing 01:40 Putting It On The Map 04:15 Vanderbilt, Carnegie And A Fifteen Million Dollar War Chest 07:00 Nine Tunnels Through The Ridges 10:20 Sixty Percent Built, Then Silence 13:05 The Meeting That Stopped It 16:10 Fifty Years With No Owner 18:40 What Is Still Out There Today Timestamps are approximate and will be adjusted to the final cut. Sources and further reading: the Pennsylvania Constitution of 1874, court records from the 1885 injunction, New York Central and Pennsylvania Railroad corporate histories, Carnegie biographies, Works Progress Administration surveys of the old grade, Pennsylvania Turnpike Commission records, county historical societies in Fulton, Bedford and Somerset counties, and 1885 newspaper reporting. Have you walked the old South Penn grade, stood at the Marysville piers, or found that roadbed in woods where no map says it should be? Tell us what you saw. #AbandonedRailroad #VanderbiltsFolly #SouthPennsylvaniaRailroad #Pennsylvania #ForgottenInfrastructure #RailroadHistory #AbandonedPlaces #UrbanExploration #HistoryDocumentary #AmericanHistory #AbandonedTunnels #PennsylvaniaTurnpike