Tunnel Hill

The tunnel gave the town its name — the five-hundred-foot bore under Tunnel Hill on the old Vincennes and Cairo line, the railroad Ambrose Burnside built in 1872 to move coal and peaches out of southern Illinois to the Ohio at Cairo. The line changed hands the way American railroads did — the Wabash, the Big Four, the New York Central, Penn Central, Conrail, Norfolk Southern — and the tunnel changed with it: originally eight hundred feet, shortened to five hundred when part of it collapsed in 1929.

The trains stopped in 1991. Norfolk Southern gave the right-of-way to the state, and the corridor became the Tunnel Hill State Trail — forty-five miles of crushed limestone through the Shawnee hill country, crossing twenty-three trestles, the longest the Breeden Trestle at ninety feet up. The trail passes through what the railroad left: the towns it made that shrank when the line closed — Parker City, Ledford, New Burnside, the ghost towns along the grade that the timetable built and the abandonment emptied.

The tunnel itself is the one on the trail — dark, dripping, the bore that the steam trains came through when the line was the economy. The haunted reports are the railroad kind: footsteps in the tunnel, sounds of a train where the tracks are gone, lights in the bore at night. The Trail of Tears crosses the line near here — the Cherokee removal route went through the same county — and the ground under the ballast is older than the railroad by a lot.

Tunnel Hill is the archive's rail-trail file — the tunnel that named the town, the line that Burnside's railroad built and the state turned into a trail, the ghost towns along the grade where the trains that made them stopped coming.