Abandoned mountain highway, Pennsylvania

In 1940, the Pennsylvania Turnpike opened as a four-lane highway across the Allegheny Mountains, built largely on the grade of an abandoned 1880s railroad. The route ran through seven tunnels, and at each one, four lanes narrowed to two. Traffic in both directions had to share a single tube. As postwar traffic grew, the tunnels became bottlenecks. The Turnpike Commission bored second tubes at four of them. For Sideling Hill and Rays Hill, east of Breezewood, it built a new stretch of highway over the mountains instead. That bypass opened on November 26, 1968, and about 13 miles of the original Turnpike were left behind, pavement, median, guardrails and all. The Cove Valley travel plaza on the abandoned section was demolished. For years, the empty stretch served as a testing ground for new highway technology. In 2001, the Turnpike Commission handed most of it to the Southern Alleghenies Conservancy, which set out to turn it into a trail. That's when the highway started to stop. In 2005, the Turnpike Commission cut off vehicle access by tearing down two bridges: the overpass that carried the old road across US 30 in Breezewood, and an overpass on Pump Station Road near the old Cove Valley plaza. With both bridges gone, the four-lane highway now ends abruptly at each end, in a hillside above Route 30 and in an earthen berm where a bridge used to be. Between those two dead ends, the road is still there. About 8.5 miles are open as a trail. Grass grows through the cracks in the pavement, faded graffiti covers the barriers, and the road runs through two unlit tunnels that together stretch more than a mile and a half. Past the eastern trailhead, another 3.5 miles still belong to the Turnpike Commission and serve as a service road. That section is closed to the public. It's a four-lane highway with no traffic, no exits and no way in for cars.