Is this a railroad tunnel? Bower Hill

http://pghbridges.com/bridgevi...468/PCYessen_tun.htm

Well how about that!  Thanks for the question Dan, and thank you for the information JMiller320.  That looks like a great Web site!!  I drove past there to work back in...oh my...it was in 1978... but I never saw it.  Of course it would have been hidden from view in the summertime.

I used to stop by Hobby Horse on the way to York, IF it was the one off I-79 to the east, then right, wend your way down a hill, turn left...probably could not find it now....the place was closed the last time I visited some years ago...like to never found a car dealer farther east in the hills and valleys south of Pittsburgh more recently.  I never saw that tunnel, nor any signs of coal mines, but I would definitely believe they were there, and that may be what started Pittsburgh toward its steel history.

It looks like a hobbit hole in the pics at the end of the link lol

When the Iron Horse shop was still there, I recall seeing that closed up portal.  Also, tried to find the other side, since most all tunnels have an entrance as well as an exit, but could never find an old portal on the other side.  Frank Hare once told me that it formerly came out about a 100' east and across the street from the hobby shop.  He used to have a warehouse/storage building almost directly in front of it.

Thanx for the information.

Paul Fischer

The whole Pgh area is riddled with old mines.  When I lived in the South Hills the new  built house 2 doors down sunk in to an old mine. the woods behind us had old coal mine sink holes all through it. That RR tunnel portal is neat, though. 

Same up in Butler.  We live in the house my wife's grandparents had built on the hill south of downtown Butler.  That hill has a worked out mine that has been closed off for decades.  The entrance was on, fittingly enough, Coal Street, off Pittsburgh Road handy the south end of the General Richard Butler Bridge.  It is a short street deadending at the entrance.  We take Pittsburgh Pike, just adjacent to it that makes a steep incline to near the top of the hill.  In the winter, it is easy to look down and see where the entrance was, but there isn't anything noteworthy left to see.  We are a couple hundred feet higher than the entrance.  Supposedly there are no tunnels or shafts under the house, according to the information Grandpa got when purchasing the lot.  I have never heard of any subsidence at all.

Interstate 70, east of Zanesville, Ohio, and west of Cambridge, Ohio collapsed into an old mine some years ago, I think in the '90's, which required a long, slow detour around on a parallel two lane road.    I had to avoid it on a couple of trips east to Pa. and York.