A Train and 2 Bodies Sealed Inside Since 1926 - Read description

i'm in uh richmond virginia today i wanted to show you something really quick uh well two sections of it one is the main area right here in in the city this is the church hill tunnel i can't get in there because it's private it's uh owned by i guess i don't know i think this is condos now or apartments and it's there it's now their dog park you can see it says 1920 yeah 1926 is when they capped it so the collapse happened in 1925 and killed four people and collapsed right on top of the train there's a steam locomotive in there with 10 cars somewhere in that 4 000 foot long tunnel and i think even recently there's been a lot of small cave-ins the whole tunnel the way it was built was or where it was built they had problems with water from day one drainage issues and cave-ins really from the beginning so the tunnel really wasn't around that long i think was built in the early 1870s and there have been talks throughout the years of excavating and getting that train out and pulling those four bodies out of there it'd be very very difficult and you know there are houses and buildings churches there's all kinds of stuff that are up above it and they said that it would most likely cause an issue with um cave-ins so i don't know what they're gonna do with this but i am gonna show you the other side the south end portal i believe uh it's accessible it's kind of in the woods it's filled with water so you can't really go in it plus it's i think after a certain distance it's it's uh also capped but i'm going to show it to you anyway and i want to see it so i'm going to walk over and show you what it looks like on top looking down at it so the tunnel is really plagued with soft ground and uh water groundwater and it caused cave-ins from the start even during the construction and i believe 10 workers were killed in the making of this so not a good start now the craziest thing is to this day it's still a concern obviously to the point where they don't want to excavate the tunnel for fear of the existing buildings above the tunnel could cave in imagine owning property and living in a house that is above an unsafe train tunnel wouldn't be good it's my workout for it today that's the view it's downtown richmond now i don't really know exactly where the south portal is so i'm just kind of following these random trails it's got to be back here somewhere but but to continue this story there were attempts to rescue those four people but that just resulted in more collapse and uh for the safety of others they they called it off all right i found it straight ahead this is really buried for being kind of in the middle of the city oh yeah unfortunately it is i guess it's not that bad i was expecting more water i gotta crush these the tire bridge here wow look at this look at that echo i brought a light as you can see it doesn't maybe about 50 feet it's blocked off now in 1998 uh i think two guys did make an attempt to get inside here and one was a reporter and one was a photographer and they both had experience with spelunking and caving so they had all their own equipment so they actually went in there and i think you can find the article i hope you can find the article online but um they were unsuccessful they could not find anything i guess it was just too far back like i told you in the beginning it was it's a 4 000 foot long tunnel so uh you know when you're crawling little by little it's going to take a while and most people believe that everywhere where the train is is completely caved in and the cave-ins have happened over the years and over the decades even after this that's what i was saying about uh there's even you can read things about church walls caving in and people's backyards caving in if you want to find that newspaper article that's 1998 richmond times dispatch reporter mark holmberg and photographer kevin morley they're the ones who explored the portions of the tunnel and like i said before the uh there were plans back as i think in the 90s and then certainly sometime in the mid 2000s 2008 maybe where they had discussed um excavating and getting the train out getting the bodies out but it's just it's just too dangerous so they said it's been put off but it's it's it's not a no it's just you know we'll see what happens in the future i would love to see this can you imagine being able to come to a richmond museum and seeing this so rest in peace to the four who died in here october 2nd 1925. well we hope they died october 2nd 1925 hope it was a instantaneous death okay i'm getting out of this jungle here in richmond in the middle of richmond virginia see you next video

Channel: Mobile Instinct 2

Views: 1,428,949

Keywords: virginia history, 1925 cave in train tunnel, mobile instinct, church hill train tunnel, richmond train tunnel, places to see in richmond

Id: 8BDiirAIenU

Length: 7min 38sec (458 seconds)

Published: Wed May 26 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/Squrlz4Ever]

I had never heard of this before. Really interesting. I would guess tunneling technology today could've made this tunnel safe, but clearly 1870s engineering wasn't up to the task.