Church Hill Tunnel
Georeferenced
Current Georeference
Image Details
- Source:
- Flickr
- Collection:
- Ronnie Pitman
- Date:
- 2018-02-18 12:46:26
- Region:
-
Richmond, Virginia
(inherited from collection) - Description:
- western entrance south side of Building IV Atrium Lofts at Cold Storage 423 N. 18th Street Richmond, Virginia 37º32'12" N, 77º25'26" W In 1872 construction of a railroad tunnel began in Richmond. The tunnel would be under Church Hill, and at almost 4,000 feet in length would connect a railroad depot on 17th Street with the shipping docks at Rockett's Landing, on the James River. The tunnel was dug by the Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad, with funding assistance and promises from the city of Richmond. The soil of Church Hill was unstable however, and several lives (and above ground, houses) were lost to cave-ins during construction; nevertheless the tunnel was completed and on December 11, 1873 the first train passed through the tunnel. One of the promises made by the city was to dredge the James River to a depth of eighteen feet but they managed to dredge less than fifteen feet, which would not accommodate ever-larger ocean going ships, and so after only about eight years the tunnel was reduced to several decades of only occasional use. A brief spurt of activity in 1912-13 led to a short extension of the tunnel, giving it a length of 4,168 feet, but by 1915 the tunnel was again taken out of service due to weakened support timbers. Ten more years of on-again, off-again use passed when in 1925 crowded conditions on other nearby rails caused the C&O management to decide to enlarge and strenthen the entire tunnel with concrete rings and to put it back into regular service. On October 2, 1925 C&O locomotive number 231 entered the tunnel from the eastern entrance, pulling ten flat cars, which were used to haul materials in and out of the tunnel. The work train traversed almost the entire length of the tunnel, stopping just 50-100 feet short of the western entrance to allow workers to fill the flat cars with debris to be hauled out. A massive cave-in 190 feet long occurred however, burying the entire train and rupturing the boiler and releasing scalding steam. Many men scrambled back through 4,000 feet of darkness to the eastern entrance, including the train's fireman, Benjamin Mosby, who was scalded and died later that day. The train's engineer, Thomas Mason, also died; his body was recovered several days after the accident. Two other missing men, Richard Lewis and H. Smith, were never found. There is speculation that an unknown number of day laborers might also have died in the cave-in. With the presence of noxious gases and the danger of further cave-ins, the recovery effort was ended with the sealing of the western entrance in 1926, the train and the remains of at least two men still entombed in the tunnel. Pictured here is the western portal to the tunnel. It is now on the private property of the Atrium Lofts at Cold Storage, an apartment building that once housed Richmond Cold Storage company. The parked cars above the entrance are on Cedar Street. The trees beyond that are in Jefferson Park.
- Source:
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- License:
- CC BY-NC 2.0
- Rating:
Georeference Details
- By:
- Levi Goren
- Date:
- Apr 4, 2026
- Total:
- 1 submission
- Confidence:
- High
- Validations:
- 0
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Timeline
All georeferencing activity and comments for this imageGeoreferenced by Levi Goren Current
Apr 4, 2026 3:14 PM
37.536258, -77.423634
126°
High Confidence
0 validations