Volunteers work to ensure Montour Trail tunnel remains open during winter
Back in the heyday of railroading, workers would venture inside the National Tunnel in Cecil Township during the winter to hack away at the ice that formed inside, preventing possible derailments.
With the tunnel now serving as an integral part of Cecil’s section of the Montour Trail, the 21st century brings a better solution to the ice issue.
“It wasn’t my great idea or anybody else’s great idea,” Bethel Park resident Bill Capp admitted. But through a series of measures that he and other Montour Trail Council volunteers have implemented over the past several years, the tunnel can remain open throughout the winter without an abundance of frozen water within.
Trail users who approach the aperture – it also is known as the McConnell Tunnel or Bishop Tunnel, depending on whom you ask – from the east will see a massive aluminum face sealing off the entrance, with a six-foot-wide opening at trail level. A similar structure is being fabricated for the west portal, where plywood continues to be in place for the moment.
The net effect is that the temperature inside the tunnel consistently remains well above freezing, and so while water continues to drip from the ceiling, it produces a wet floor instead of an icy one.
Users gain access through plastic strips, similar to the ones you’ll see attached to supermarket refrigerators, attached to wooden vestibules on each side. The interior has been lit since 2012, also helping to ensure a safe passage through the tunnel’s 623 feet.
Safety concerns following a cyclist’s injury inside led to the trail council deciding to close the tunnel during winter, with construction sawhorses blocking the entrance.

Volunteers work on assembling plywood during the early years of protecting the tunnel against the elements.
“That kept 90 percent of the people out, but there were still people who moved the horses aside and went through,” Capp recalled. “So the next year, we put a cyclone fence up, and put chains on it and locked it. Some people still went around it.”
Finally, volunteers assembled plywood structures with access doors that were locked, effectively putting an end to wintertime access. In the meantime, Dennis Sims, then president of Cecil Township Friends of the Montour Trail and a meteorologist by profession, monitored interior temperatures.
“During the first week of January, there were several consecutive days of sub-freezing temps with overnight lows in the single digits,” he wrote in the January-February 2017 issue of the Montour Trail Council’s newsletter. “The sensor readings show that the temperature dropped from 50 to around 46 during the cold spell.”

In past winters, massive quantities of ice formed inside the National Tunnel.
Having come up with a viable alternative, volunteers still were faced with the task of removing the plywood structures each spring. And so prompted by the presence of aluminum doors at the Big Savage Tunnel in Somerset County, part of Great Allegheny Passage, the trail council pursued that route.
The cost is about $60,000, Capp said, with the money coming from the pool of donations collected by the council, the nonprofit, all-volunteer group that builds, operates and maintains the trail.
A major fundraiser is each April’s 10-kilometer race along the trail and through the tunnel in Cecil, an event for which ice caused problems as far as preparation.
“The first couple of weeks of April, the tunnel still had two- to three-feet-thick ice on the floor,” Capp explained. “So we had to go in there with digging bars, break it up and then get the backhoe to lift it or get the front-end loader on the tractor to lift it and bring it out.”
The National Tunnel was bored in 1913-14 and was used by railroad traffic through 1980, and then was included in the original section of the Montour Trail in 1992. The floor has been paved since 2008, with the trail council buying the asphalt and Cecil Township providing the work at no cost.
For more information about the Montour Trail, visit montourtrail.org.

Map data ©2019 Google