Why 13 Miles of the Pennsylvania Turnpike Were Abandoned

In the mountains of southern Pennsylvania there are thirteen miles of four-lane highway that no car has driven since 1968. Not a country road. Not a service road. A full divided highway, two lanes in each direction, with a median, with shoulders, with drainage, with two tunnels bored straight through solid mountain — one of them more than a mile long. It is all still there. Nobody tore it up. Nobody filled it in. Pennsylvania simply stopped using it, built a new road around the outside, and left this one exactly where it was. And the strangest part isn't the abandonment. It's that these tunnels were already old when the highway got here.