Winston Tunnel
| Overview | |
|---|---|
| Line | Chicago Great Western Railway |
| Location | Jo Daviess County, 9 miles (14 km) west of Elizabeth, IL |
| Coordinates | 42°20′05″N 90°21′50″W / 42.33472°N 90.36389°WCoordinates: 42°20′05″N 90°21′50″W / 42.33472°N 90.36389°W |
| Status | abandoned and closed |
| Operation | |
| Opened | 1888 |
| Closed | 1972 |
| Owner | Minnesota and Northwestern Railroad |
| Technical | |
| Line length | 2,493 feet (760 m) |
| Highest elevation | 797 feet (243 m) above sea level |
| Tunnel clearance | 18.5 feet (5.6 m) |
| Grade | 0.92% (rising east) |
The Winston Tunnel is a railroad tunnel located 9 miles (14.5 kilometers) west of Elizabeth, Illinois.
The tunnel was completed in 1888 for the Minnesota and Northwestern Railroad, a predecessor to the Chicago Great Western Railway (CGW). The tunnel was located on the CGW main line 152 miles (245 kilometers) west of Chicago in the isolated and hilly Driftless Area of extreme north-western Illinois.
In 1972, four years after the Chicago Great Western was merged into the Chicago and North Western Railway (C&NW), the CGW's largely redundant trackage in the area, including the Winston Tunnel, was abandoned. It was the third longest railroad tunnel in Illinois at 2,493 feet (760 m). Two longer (still active) tunnels are located on the Canadian National (ex-Illinois Central) Edgewood Cutoff Line, the longest being Tunnel #2 near Abbot, Illinois which is 6,994 feet (2,132 m) long.
The newly constructed Minnesota and Northwestern Railroad across northern Illinois used trackage rights on the Illinois Central Railroad between Dubuque, Iowa and in 1886 before construction on its own line through the isolated wilderness could commence. Engineers quickly realized that a tunnel would need to be constructed in order to traverse the rugged landscape. The Sheppard, Winston and Company (for which the tunnel would be named) and more than 350 laborers worked by hand, digging through the silty and unstable shale for nine months starting in the spring of 1887. The work was both strenuous and dangerous, and at least one worker, a thirty-two-year-old Finnish immigrant named John Hill, was killed. When complete, the total cost of the tunnel, $600,000, had exceeded expectations.
The tunnel proved to be a constant nuisance to the Chicago Great Western and its predecessors. Almost immediately, railroad engineers realized that the unstable nature of shale through which the tunnel was bored, ground water seepage, and the isolated location of the tunnel meant repairs would be frequent and costly. The tunnel was originally braced by wooden beams when it opened to rail traffic in January 1888, but these eventually proved inadequate, and were replaced in 1902 by brick and reinforced concrete. Constant deterioration of the supports meant that large-scale reconstruction of the tunnel was needed in 1912, 1918, 1944 and 1947.
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