Montour Trail Council working to repair dangerous cracks in National Tunnel | KD Sunday Spotlight

The Montour Trail is the longest suburban rail trail in America. It's more than 60 miles long, going through Allegheny and Washington counties. It connects Coraopolis to Clairton, but about halfway down, at trail mile marker 25, in Cecil Township, you find a closed sign.

The National Tunnel, also known as the "wet tunnel," is closed, and the Montour Trail Council is trying to fix what's dangerous and even unseen to the naked eye.

"People are now just riding up to the tunnel and turning around, saying, 'What happened?'" National Tunnel renovation project manager Paul McKeown said. "But if you know where it is and you look at it, yeah, there's definitely a problem there."

He gave KDKA-TV a closer look at the 630-foot tunnel, which is the longest of the three tunnels on the Montour. It's also one of the most recognizable, but it was closed in November.

"At the wall, it shifted outward, and up at the center crack at the top, it's shifted downwards," said McKeown. "We knocked down a lot of loose concrete just by having a crew go in there with hard hats. They tapped on it until pieces fell off to make sure it wasn't going to fall on somebody's head."

The cracks are too big, and the ceiling deteriorated after 113 years. 

"And then after that process, they said, 'OK, how do we grade this?' And it's like, now we have to close it?" McKeown recalled.

The Montour Trail Council is trying to raise a whopping $3 million to repair it.

"This is the largest infrastructure project that the Montour Trail Council has undertaken since it built out large sections of this old rail line," Montour Trail Council president Julian Wolfe said.

The National Tunnel needs a 295-foot steel liner, similar to work used to repair the Greer Tunnel two years ago in Peters Township. 

Wolfe said, "The Montour railroad started in 1879, and now this infrastructure is aging out." He said, "And it's very costly for an all-volunteer nonprofit organization to cope with."

The Montour Trail Council has been a volunteer-led nonprofit since 1989. 

Wolfe said, "We don't receive any recurring tax revenue from the federal government, the state government, the county government."

It's on a mighty mission to keep the Montour Trail for years to come. The Montour Trail sees upwards of 400,000 trail usages yearly. "Some people actually use it to get to work; some people use it for recreational purposes," said Wolfe.

However, the closure of the National Tunnel cuts off all travelers at the midpoint. 

Wolfe said, "It's an enormous impediment and more than just an inconvenience."

There's no safe detour around it, but with relentless work to raise funds for repairs, the Montour Trail Council hopes to one day reopen the National Tunnel safely.

The Montour Trail Council did apply for state grants for the repairs. So far, it has almost one-third of the money needed through donations from people and organizations like the Richard King Mellon Foundation.

They expect the National Tunnel to remain closed until September 2027.

For more information on the project and the Montour Trail Council nonprofit, click here.