All posts in Moffat Tunnel

As the Moffat Tunnel pressed forward through failing ground, the danger long suspended above its West Portal crews came down “with a roar” on July 30, 1926.

Moffat Tunnel Construction Happenings from 100 Years Ago

On July 1, 1926, the pioneer water bore was reported as 88.4 percent complete, with only 3,917 feet separating the headings driven from East and West Portals beneath the Continental Divide. The main railroad headings had reached a combined total of 27,340 feet, while the full-size railroad tunnel extended 20,681 feet, or roughly 64 percent of its planned length.

Those figures measured related but distinct operations. The 3,917-foot gap referred to the parallel pioneer water bore, while the railroad headings and the enlarged railroad tunnel advanced on their own uneven schedule. Progress in one did not mean that the other had escaped the mountain’s worst conditions.

East Portal crews had pushed the water bore beyond the three-mile mark. Their work was complicated by water still running at roughly 650 gallons per minute. The flow was caught in a sump and pumped back to the apex. West Portal presented a different and more punishing obstacle. There, progress had been retarded almost continuously by soft, wet, unstable ground requiring timbering every few inches. The material was described bluntly as “bad rock,” though the difficulty lay as much in the yielding ground as in the rock itself.

The standard eight-by-eight-foot heading had to be widened to sixteen feet and then raised to the full railroad-tunnel height of twenty-four feet. Every enlargement exposed a broader area overhead and demanded careful temporary support before work could continue.

The underlying engineering problem had become impossible to ignore. At West Portal, more than 7,000 feet of the railroad bore had been completed at full size, while the eight-by-eight-foot heading had advanced beyond 12,000 feet from the portal. At portions already enlarged to full size, two jumbo crews could work in opposite directions under temporary timber sets. Their progress depended on maintaining support as enlargement proceeded, because shifting posts or loosened rock could expose men beneath an unstable roof.

The work was organized around specialized crews. Jumbo crews drilled and enlarged the opening; muckers cleared broken rock; locomotive operators moved cars in and out of the bore; and timber crews followed wherever ground conditions demanded additional support. Inspectors and assistant superintendents remained near the work almost constantly, particularly in the unstable material encountered from West Portal. Crews drilled, mucked, widened, benched, timbered, reassessed, and advanced again according to what the mountain allowed for that shift.

The difficult ground had already been reflected in the Moffat Tunnel Commission’s financial and progress reports. At East Portal, water impeded operations. At West Portal, the ground could press against timbers, settle after exposure, and require repeated reinforcement. Timbering alone had added approximately $2 million beyond earlier expectations. Engineers had initially anticipated only 1,500 feet of difficult material, later revised that estimate to 8,000 feet, and eventually concluded that nearly three and one-quarter miles of the completed tunnel would require timbering.

As of July 7, 1926, the Commission reported total receipts of $14,683,559.31 and total disbursements of $9,457,130.32. The accounts covered far more than bond proceeds and excavation costs: they recorded boarding house receipts, commissary sales, cottage rents, hospital, recreation hall, and post office receipts, as well as power line construction. The tunnel project supported two remote portal camps, each accommodating roughly 500 workmen, with housing, medical care, food service, recreation, mail, and power infrastructure. After all, this was a temporary community organized around one of Colorado’s largest public works.

Above ground, camp life continued with an almost ordinary rhythm. On July 1, an advertisement urged men to seek work at West Portal: “MEN WANTED: Go get a job at the West Portal if you can deliver the goods. See the Superintendent and tell him you saw this ad.” Approximately one hundred additional men were reportedly employed by Contractors Hitchcock and Tinkler, Inc., for summer work. The tunnel was idle on July 5. Sailor Burns was scheduled to fight Billy Hammond of Denver in a six-round bout on July 10, with both men weighing in at 142 pounds.

Baseball provided an outlet for rivalry between the camps. The West Portal team had been strengthened by several capable players, and the East and West Portal teams met at Empire, Colorado on neutral ground. West Portal won the first game, 10–4, after rain and poor field conditions made play difficult. A later contest ended 14–4 in West Portal’s favor. Workers and supporters from both camps traveled to watch, and the contests gave the remote work camps identities beyond the tunnel and their shift schedules.

That ordinary life was punctuated by increasingly difficult industrial accidents that month.

On July 20, Ralph McClellan, a thirty-three-year-old West Portal benchman, was struck by a falling boulder. He suffered fatal injuries and died two days later. The accident was an immediate reminder of the danger inherent in work beneath unstable ground, but tunnel operations continued. The project remained under pressure to advance, and the difficult conditions at West Portal required men to keep entering the same formations that had already demonstrated their capacity to fail.

As the nation marked the 150th anniversary of American independence, Colorado was preparing to celebrate fifty years of statehood on August 1. The semicentennial encouraged reflection on Colorado’s industrial growth, transportation systems, mining, agriculture, and water development. The Moffat Tunnel was repeatedly presented as one of the state’s great engineering undertakings, a route intended to remove the costly burden of hauling rail traffic up and over Rollins Pass.

Yet the final two days of July would place a far different measure on the project with the most serious accident the Moffat Tunnel project would face.

Just before noon on Friday, July 30, the inside jumbo crew were installing temporary timbering in the widened bench of the main bore, forty-three feet from the tunnel heading and roughly 12,000 feet inside the mountain. The heading at that point had been driven at the usual eight-by-eight-foot dimension, and crews were performing the regular enlargement process, first widening it to sixteen feet and then heightening it to twenty-four.

According to Martin Green, assistant superintendent, the enlargement process had loosened a large mass of rock above the tunnel. He had inspected the timber set minutes earlier and noticed one side sagging; under his direction, that side had been hastily repaired. But as crews turned to reinforce the opposite side, the remaining overhead mass gave way “with a roar,” sending more than 100–125 tons of rock and splintered timbers down onto the men on their scaffolding. Witnesses confirmed that the crew had no warning. The rock crashed through the timbers that had been set to protect them, burying the men “like mice in a trap.”

The three best shift bosses on the job had been assigned to the unstable area. One was John Adams, who was caught in the collapse. The others, Joseph Gallagher and W. H. Smith, were off duty when the roof came down.

The final shift rotation before the cave-in adds an element of tragic contingency. William E. Pierson, one of the victims, had originally refused a reassignment earlier that morning because he wanted to remain beside his friend Jim. Green eventually persuaded him to change crews only after assuring him that the companion arrangement would be restored the next day. Pierson agreed, without knowing that the decision would place him inside the doomed jumbo set.

In contrast, John Adams Jr., the locomotive operator and son of the shift boss, narrowly escaped. He had been standing several yards behind the crew, operating an electric engine that had been backed into the tunnel but not yet pushed close enough for muckers to fill the cars. When the roof caved, he caught a final glimpse of his father in the swirl of falling debris before the rock obliterated the timbering. He was unhurt because his engine had not yet advanced to the working face.

Rescuers feared that one or two additional men, not officially assigned to the shift, might have been near the work when the roof fell. That possibility was never confirmed.

For a time, there remained a fragile hope that some of the buried men might have survived in a protected void. “In many places the timbers have held the rocks and crevices run into the mass,” one account stated. “These crevices would have permitted air to reach the entombed men.” The possibility that broken timbers had held part of the rock off the men provided the only basis for hope. But no sound came from the tangle of stone and shattered wood.

More than 500 men were said to be above ground at West Portal that night. Many pleaded with shift bosses, superintendents, and other officials for the opportunity to go underground and help. There was no reported hysteria. Families of tunnel workers initially went to the portal to await word, but when it became known that none of the trapped men had relatives in camp, those who had been waiting in fear turned to helping in whatever way they could. In the recreation hall men waited quietly for assignment. At 11 p.m., forty selected miners boarded flatcars behind an electric engine and entered the tunnel to relieve another forty-man crew already working at the cave-in. “They wasted no efforts in words. Their efforts are being saved for the struggle with the rocks and twisted timber inside.”

At the scene, the first impression could have suggested disorder. The two-mile ride through the long, dripping, electrically illuminated tunnel led to a work area crowded with men, tools, lights, wet stone, and splintered timber. Yet the rescue was being conducted systematically. Each member of the crew was an experienced hard-rock miner, and each knew his task. The roof had caved for approximately twenty-five feet. The void rose more than six feet above the former roofline, while the fallen material nearly filled the opening. Before rescuers could remove the rock and splintered timbers covering the victims, they had to stabilize the roof with additional temporary timbering. Attempting to uncover the men before the overhead mass had been secured would have exposed the rescue crews to the same danger.

The interior was cold. Water dripped constantly from the roof. Men sloshed through mud and muck beneath electric lights, while shadows stretched across the wet stone walls. The sound of tools, commands, and breathing carried down the long tunnel corridor toward the surface.

The crew that entered at 11 p.m. worked under J. G. Casey and Charles Miller, assistant superintendents with decades of hard-rock experience. Their instructions were brief and direct. Timbers had to be raised, secured, and braced before any further advance could be made. Then rock could be moved, but only as far as the newly stabilized opening allowed. The process repeated itself through the night: support, excavation, and another assessment of the roof. Martin Green, Troy Brannigan, and Robert Lall repeatedly entered unstable voids in the early rescue effort despite the danger and spent almost continuous time inside the bore thereafter.

Within minutes of the collapse, they reached Hartzel T. Thompson, who had been pinned under several boulders nearer the tunnel entrance. Thompson was conscious and survived into the evening. He told Dr. McDonald that he had heard someone shout “look out,” saw a companion fall at his feet, and then felt everything go black. His leg had been twisted at a right angle. Thompson was the only man removed alive from the wreckage. His father, brother, and sisters came from Fort Collins to be with him. Despite the rescue, his injuries proved fatal, and he died later that night.

As the digging progressed, workers found small but unmistakable signs that they were nearing the dead: fragments of two pencils and a garter. Those discoveries intensified the effort. Charles Miller eventually forced his way through a narrow opening in the debris and found Park Gasaway lying slightly in advance of the others. Nearby, pairs of legs and an arm protruded from broken timbers several feet apart. Gasaway’s head and body had been crushed so completely that death was unquestionably immediate. Each body had to be removed under extreme hazard. Gasaway’s body reached West Portal just before midnight hailed the start of August 1926, where a silent crowd had gathered at the entrance. The little schoolhouse at West Portal became a temporary morgue. Dr. Susan Anderson, known throughout Colorado as Doc Susie, and state mine inspector Thomas R. Henahen examined the dead. Identification was difficult. Faces had been crushed, and some brass identification tags were missing. One victim was identified only through a paycheck found in his pocket.

The men had arrived at the tunnel from different places and under different circumstances. Pierson was believed to have a wife living in Denver. Parosek had arrived only the day before and had worked one and one-half shifts before he was killed; his nearest known relative was Frank Poceal of Denver. Ferguson had been at the tunnel only four days, and his mother lived in Vivian, Louisiana. Gasaway had come to Denver from the Oklahoma oil fields and had lived for several years in Salt Lake City; authorities attempted to reach his family in Indianapolis. Thompson was from Fort Collins, and his family reached his bedside before he died.

As the recovery continued, state and federal officials converged on West Portal. Commissioner of Mines J. T. Joyce, E. H. Cenny of the Federal Bureau of Mines, Coroner Anderson, and others assessed the scene. Joyce announced that his office would conduct a rigid investigation. Hitchcock, Tinkler, Kauffman, Cohig, Betts, and other directing officials remained at West Portal to oversee rescue operations, ensure that no additional men were endangered, and require further timbering before each renewed advance. During the recovery operations, newspapers still ran advertisements seeking Moffat Tunnel laborers and drillers. A jarring juxtaposition; yet the mountain had to be pierced.

All three assistant superintendents stated that every possible precaution had been taken to protect the men and that nothing more could reasonably have prevented the accident. Commissioner Joyce later described the collapse as an “unavoidable accident,” noting that all the timbers possible had been placed in the jumbo set. That conclusion did not change the landscape of loss left behind by the cave-in.

Though it had never been easy, excavation of the Moffat Tunnel was becoming more difficult. Progress was slow, then slower still. When work resumed in the bore, the crews returned to a mountain that had already taken men from their ranks—and would take more before the work was done. In time, the tunnel would be finished, the headings would meet, and trains would pass beneath the Divide through a passage marked by blood. The collapse had left damage that could not be measured in feet of tunnel or tons of rock: friendships severed, families left to grieve, and bodies crushed beyond recognition. In the hurried accounts that followed, their names, too, were broken apart—misspelled, confused, and eventually lost in the larger story of the Moffat Tunnel. Here they are—restored to the timeline, restored to the story, and returned to the undertaking in which they lost their lives: John Adams, Henry Ferguson, Park A. Gasaway, William E. Pierson, John Parosek, and Hartzel T. Thompson.

Newspaper coverage of the Moffat Tunnel cave-in that claimed the lives of John Adams, Henry Ferguson, Park A. Gasaway, William E. Pierson, John Parosek, and Hartzel T. Thompson.

July 1926 construction progress, drawn to scale by C. A. Betts, office engineer for the Moffat Tunnel Commission.

B. Travis Wright, MPS | Preserve Rollins Pass | July 4, 2026

Want to uncover more incredible Moffat Tunnel stories? Our blog is filled with deeper dives into its history, untold tales, and connections to Rollins Pass. Explore more and journey through time with us!

The primary purpose of our work is to inform the public.

• Facebook
• Mail
• Twitter
• Amazon
• Goodreads
• YouTube
• LinkedIn

In June 1926, with the pioneer tunnel 87 percent complete, the Moffat Tunnel occupied a strange position in Colorado: nearly certain, still contested, and already marked by losses no progress report could measure.

Moffat Tunnel Construction Happenings from 100 Years Ago

By June 1926, the Moffat Tunnel was still unfinished, yet it had already become part of Colorado’s public imagination. Newspapers could measure its progress in percentages. Tourists could plan excursions to see the portals. Critics could argue over cost, competence, and whether the undertaking was being managed with sufficient economy. Meanwhile, at West Portal, 504 men were employed at the start of the month, a reminder that the project was still being advanced by individual workers, shift by shift, beneath a shoulder of James Peak.

The figures were encouraging: as of June 1, the headings of the water, or pioneer, tunnel were only 4,375 feet apart and 87 percent complete. The main headings of the railroad tunnel stood 83.5 percent complete, while the full-size railroad tunnel had reached 62.5 percent. On paper, the arithmetic looked straightforward and promising. Underground, each remaining foot still had to be earned through rock removal, water evacuation, timbering, ventilation, machinery, and human risk. It was far enough along to be expensive, visible, and politically accountable, but still unfinished enough to be judged by every delay. The task was not becoming easier simply because the public had begun anticipating the celebration.

The camps, however, had lives of their own. One of the more revealing notices from the month announced, “Big Sport Event at West Portal Camp,” where “there are going to be big doings at West Portal on Thursday night, June 10.” Sailor Danny Burns of East Portal was scheduled to meet Lew Wallace of Denver in a six-round finish fight, with “many fight fans of the western slope” expected to attend. The clipping reminds us that the Moffat Tunnel was not only a construction site; it was a community with rivalries, entertainments, reputations, and the ordinary human need to gather somewhere lively after hard work that took place deep underground.

Baseball belonged to this same world. The Denver Rock Drill Manufacturers’ team, fittingly known as the Drillers, planned to travel to East Portal on July 4 to play Hitchcock’s “team of diamond stars.” The Drillers had made the trip the previous year and returned with a victory; they expected to repeat the performance. The confidence is charming, if perhaps unsurprising from a team named after the very tools helping to open the mountain.

The tunnel had also become a destination. The annual outing and picnic of the Shorter A.M.E. Sunday School was planned for July 5 at Tolland, “on the scenic Moffat railroad,” where excursionists would have an opportunity to view “the great Moffat Tunnel” and enjoy fishing, hiking, and resting in a pavilion. Motor tourists traveling over Berthoud Pass passed near the West Portal, while passengers on the Moffat Road caught glimpses of the East Portal. People were being invited to see a tunnel that had not yet fulfilled its purpose, but had already become an attraction through the scale of the effort itself.

One article described it plainly as the “famous hole thru range,” a phrase that manages to be both inelegant and nearly perfect. The Moffat Tunnel was being drilled through the backbone of the continent to remove the burden of the high line over Rollins Pass, eliminating punishing four-percent grades and lowering the railroad’s passage from 11,676 feet to approximately 9,238 feet. The proposed benefit was not subtle. In combination with the Dotsero Cutoff, the tunnel was expected to shorten the rail distance between Denver and the Pacific coast, by way of Salt Lake City, by 173 miles.

Edward A. Vandeventer made the point in grander language, calling the tunnel “the greatest moving job ever undertaken by man.” In his telling, the tunnel was moving Denver itself: a “city of 250,000 inhabitants, skyscrapers, churches, bootleggers, bandits and all, not a few hundred feet but 173 miles to the west.” “All of which,” he continued, was being done “without interrupting the daily routine for a second of the citizens of the city that is being ‘moved,’—Denver.” The Moffat Tunnel would not physically move Denver, but it promised to shift the city’s relationship with the West. Geography had placed Denver against the mountains; the tunnel was an attempt to alter the consequences of that fact.

Not everyone was persuaded by the cost of doing so. By June, criticism had sharpened, especially over delays and the expensive surprises encountered inside the mountain. Some of that scrutiny was appropriate. The tunnel was a public undertaking, backed by the credit of a district, and public works should be answerable to the people asked to support them. Yet some criticism also carried the unrealistic expectation that the Moffat Tunnel Commissioners should have known every condition hidden thousands of feet beneath James Peak before the drills arrived.

One writer met that expectation with sarcasm, observing that Charley Leckenby and the other members of the Moffat Tunnel Commission were apparently to blame because they lacked “eyes that could see several thousand feet into the mountain on the west side, where so much soft rock has been encountered.” The error, the writer suggested, was choosing commissioners “not equipped with x-ray eyes.” Another mistake, naturally, was “not letting the Denver Post take complete charge.”

Leckenby’s own response was more formal, but no less pointed. As secretary of the Moffat Tunnel Commission and editor of the Steamboat Pilot newspaper, he did not argue that citizens had no right to ask questions. He argued the opposite: “There can be no presumption in his, or any other citizen asking any question relative to the great work.” The tunnel, he wrote, was “a public job, involving the credit of a district of great wealth.” The records were open. There were “no star chamber meetings, no secrets, nothing to conceal.” Leckenby was asking that criticism be grounded in the conditions of the work. The tunnel law had been passed by the legislature, the location followed decades of railroad surveys, and the elected commission was answerable for a public undertaking backed by district real estate. The tunnel could be scrutinized, but it could not be made simple by pretending that soft rock, water, and underground pressure were failures of imagination rather than conditions encountered in the work.

The phrase that most irritated him appears to have been “if ever,” as in whether the tunnel would be completed, “if ever.” By June 1926, Leckenby had little patience for that formulation. “The tunnel is some 80 per cent completed,” he wrote. “The money is on hand to complete it even though the remaining mile is bad ground. It will be completed approximately a year from this date.” He did not pretend the work had been easy or inexpensive. Instead, he placed cost beside consequence: “It is a big job, it has cost a lot of money, but it is going to be finished and it will be worth every dollar it has cost.” Leckenby also stated, “There have been discouragements and difficulties in plenty, but they are being overcome. The best engineering and tunnel building talent in the world has been employed and many world’s records have been made in tunnel building. Every corner and angle of the job has been watched to facilitate operations and to do the work at the least possible cost.”

His defense shows why the tunnel cannot be understood only as a railroad improvement. He connected it to northwestern Colorado coal, oil, livestock, agriculture, precious metals, and water. Denver, he reminded readers, did “not live to itself alone;” it prospered as the surrounding territory prospered. The tunnel was therefore not just a bore through the Continental Divide; it was an argument about Denver’s future orientation, the development of the Western Slope, and whether the mountain barrier would remain a limiting fact or become an engineering problem to be solved.

The same June record shows how the tunnel drew men to West Portal in the first place. Hitchcock & Tinkler advertised for laborers, drillers, and timbermen, with muckers in the tunnel earning $4.75 per eight-hour shift, drill helpers and timbermen earning $5.00, and drillers earning $5.50. The work ran three shifts, seven days a week, a schedule that says almost as much as the wage table. Board, bed, and bedding cost $1.50 per day, with two men to a room; the camp promised a hospital, hot and cold water, toilets in the living quarters, a dry room, laundry, recreation hall, pool room, and movies. It reads partly like a want ad and partly like a controlled glimpse into an industrial town built at the edge of the mountain. The Steamboat Pilot added that Hitchcock & Tinkler needed men at West Portal, were generally pleased with the workers they had drawn from that section of Colorado, and wanted more of them, with Routt and Moffat County men given preference. The tunnel was a statewide ambition, but it was also a local labor call, drawing mountain men toward a dangerous job that promised steady wages, tolerable quarters, and the chance, at least on paper, to be part of something larger than the shift ahead.

Yet June also carried loss, and the human cost cannot be treated as an afterthought simply because the public narrative was turning toward completion. On June 22, James Clinton Platter died, seven weeks after being badly crushed underground at West Portal. Born in Iowa in 1884, he had known loss early: his mother died when he was only three, and his first wife, Lena, died in Steamboat Springs during the influenza epidemic. He later remarried, became the father of two young daughters, and in January 1924 came to West Portal for steady work, presumably seeking the kind of stability grief had so often denied him. Two and a half years later, he was badly injured underground. The reports noted that no bones were broken, a clinical reassurance that now reads with terrible incompleteness; it could not measure seven weeks of suffering, Mary left widowed, Cora and Edna left fatherless, or the unmarked grave in Iowa where his body was placed beside members of the family he had lost.

James Clinton Platter’s death changes how June 1926 at the Moffat Tunnel must be understood. Without him, the undertaking can be made to appear almost orderly: feet advanced, percentages completed, dollars spent, contracts signed, and miles eventually saved. His story belongs in the same June record as the picnic notices, the boxing announcement, the baseball confidence, the tourist writing, and Leckenby’s defense of the commission because, together, they show the tunnel as it actually was: a public achievement taking shape inside a dangerous mountain, where ordinary hopes and permanent losses occupied the same ground.

By the end of June, some writers were already looking past construction and toward the future. One clipping predicted that the names of W. P. Robinson, Charles M. Willcox, W. N. W. Blayney, Chas. H. Leckenby, and Charles J. Wheeler would someday be “emblazoned on a tablet” at the tunnel entrance “as a memorial of a great work well performed.” The language was celebratory, but it was also prescient; even before the tunnel was finished, observers understood that the work would require some form of public reckoning, a way to name the men credited with carrying the undertaking through. Another clipping reached further back, imagining Berthoud, Bridger, Rollins, and “the other hardy pioneers” present in spirit at West Portal when the first train emerged from the tunnel, rejoicing at the “subjugation of the great front range,” which the writer called “their dream of the long ago.”

The phrase belongs unmistakably to its time, but the instinct behind it is powerful. In June 1926, the Moffat Tunnel was being framed not merely as a modern engineering success, but as the latest chapter in a much older Colorado story of routes sought, mountains crossed, and difficult geography gradually made negotiable. It was a workplace, a camp, a tourist curiosity, a political argument, a regional development strategy, and a hazardous underground undertaking all at once. Above the project remained the route over Rollins Pass, magnificent yet punishing, a line that had proven what could be done while also demonstrating why something different was needed. Beneath the Continental Divide, the new route was still incomplete, costly, dangerous, and contested, but increasingly difficult to dismiss. By June 1926, somewhere between promise and completion, the Moffat Tunnel had become inseparable from Colorado’s history and was already emerging as one of its greatest stories.

Summer 1926 at the East Portal. The nearest building on the left is the Mess Hall, with the Bath House farther beyond it. Centered in the background, the tallest structure is the Rock Crushing Plant. In the right mid-ground stands the large Timber Framing Shed, while the structure in the right foreground is the Change Room. Of particular interest is how close both the Bath House and the Change Room stood to the portal—a layout also mirrored at West Portal. The reason was not merely convenience, but concern over pneumonia. Contemporary engineers understood the danger well enough to design explicit countermeasures into the tunnel camps. As Clifford Allen Betts recorded in Transactions of the American Society of Civil Engineers, Paper No. 1771, the camps relied on a centralized laundry—“the central wash house, there being no tubs in camp”—equipped with stationary tubs, shower baths, toilets, and ample hot water. More tellingly, Betts stated without ambiguity that, “as a preventive of pneumonia, which at that altitude is pernicious,” purpose-built change houses were constructed at each portal so men coming off shift could pass from the tunnel into sheltered space, shower, and change into dry clothing before prolonged exposure to the cold outside. Wet garments were clipped to wire-rope hoists and raised overhead to dry, with each line secured inside the owner’s locker—an operational detail that underscores both the routine saturation of tunnel work and the deliberate effort to break the cycle of cold, dampness, and exhaustion. These were not incidental camp amenities. They were pieces of occupational health infrastructure, justified in the engineer’s own words as a defense against pneumonia and as an acknowledgment that respiratory illness was an anticipated, persistent hazard of tunnel work at altitude.

Inside a Moffat Tunnel change house, wet garments were clipped to wire-rope hoists, raised overhead to dry, and secured inside each worker’s locker. The men gathered near the stove are surrounded by evidence of a daily problem: saturated clothing, cold air, and the deliberate effort to reduce the exhaustion and pneumonia risk that followed hard work underground.

B. Travis Wright, MPS | Preserve Rollins Pass | June 21, 2026

Want to uncover more incredible Moffat Tunnel stories? Our blog is filled with deeper dives into its history, untold tales, and connections to Rollins Pass. Explore more and journey through time with us!

The primary purpose of our work is to inform the public.

• Facebook
• Mail
• Twitter
• Amazon
• Goodreads
• YouTube
• LinkedIn

In May 1926, the Moffat Tunnel faced bad ground, rising costs, public doubt, and one patented Colorado invention that helped keep the work moving beneath James Peak.

Moffat Tunnel Construction Happenings from 100 Years Ago

Editor’s Note: May 1926 was not a quiet chapter in the Moffat Tunnel saga. Major developments arrived one after another, making this a denser installment than usual, but history does not always arrive in neat portions. June 1926, by contrast, would prove far quieter: the proverbial calm before July’s heartbreaking storm.

May 1926 brought no easy miles beneath the shoulder James Peak. At East Portal, water still dogged the crews, even as the flow slowly began to diminish. At West Portal, the mountain pressed hard enough to crush timber and delay progress foot by foot. In Denver, the same tunnel that promised a shorter route through the Rockies had become a test of money, patience, and public trust. The month opened with a sentence that captured the whole enterprise in miniature: “Both portal headings are in bad ground and progress continues slow, although the water flow at East Portal is slowly diminishing.” That was May 12. It was not triumph, but it was not defeat either. The water was easing. The work continued. The mountain, stubborn as ever, had not yet given permission for optimism.

Then came a better sign. After months of soft rock and excessive water, workers at the East Portal pushed into dry, hard rock again. Twenty-four feet were gained in a single day. In tunnel work, distance was morale, and twenty-four feet could sound like a drumbeat after months of mud, pressure, and pumping. The water at the East Portal had been especially difficult because the tunnel, from that side, had passed the apex and was being driven on a downgrade. Gravity was no friend. Every inflow wanted to follow the men and impede their progress.

The Associated Press put it plainly from Denver on May 18: “After being delayed several months, by soft rock and excessive water flows, workmen at the East Portal of the Moffat Tunnel under James Peak, on the Continental Divide, today struck hard rock. Engineers now expect to make steady progress and have the tunnel completed this summer. Workers bored twenty-four feet today.”

But the story of the Moffat Tunnel isn’t only about East Portal. “Difficult conditions still prevail at the West Portal, however, necessitating the timbering of every foot.” That “however” was doing heavy work. On the west side, the ground still crushed timbers, slowed crews, and mocked estimates. The headings of the two portals were reported to be about 4,600 feet apart, close enough to feel the dream becoming real, yet still far enough for the mountain to demand more money, more steel, more timber, and more nerve.

This is where George Lewis’ cantilever beam belongs in the story. We first spoke of this engineering marvel in our April 1925 article. The machine was not a decorative engineering footnote. It was born from a practical crisis at the West Portal, where earlier methods for supporting the roof during bench* excavation had failed to provide the control needed in soft ground. The article “Speeding Up The Moffat Tunnel” described the device as a new method of excavation developed for “the uncertain character of the material and the tendency of the side walls to move in on the tunnel during construction.” The headline gave it the flourish it deserved: “New Cantilever Beam Cuts Time in Half, Saves Labor Costs, and Prevents Disastrous Slides.”

*In tunnel work, a bench is not a seat or a worktable. It is the lower mass of rock left in place after the upper portion of the tunnel, or heading, has been driven forward. Crews could advance the smaller upper opening first, then later drill, blast, and remove the bench beneath it to bring the tunnel down to its full railroad height.

On May 4, 1926, the United States Patent Office granted George Lewis of Denver patent No. 1,583,075 for “Method and Apparatus for Supporting Timbering in Tunnels.” The application had been filed June 5, 1925, and the patent record identifies Lewis as assignor of one-half to Peter Seerie. That detail gives the May 1926 story an important anchor: while newspapers were reporting bad ground, water, bonds, criticism, and worry, the federal patent record was recognizing a Colorado tunnel engineer’s solution to one of the very problems threatening the project’s completion.

Lewis’ patent explained the problem with elegant bluntness. In soft ground, the roof and walls of a tunnel had to be held in place by heavy timbers. Traditional temporary plumb posts interfered with the use of a steam shovel and increased labor. His object was “to produce a method of tunneling that shall greatly decrease the labor cost and an apparatus by means of which the method may be carried out.” The method supported the wall plates and roof ribs from the upper surface of the bench until the permanent plumb posts could be installed, allowing a steam shovel to remove muck and helping “prevent the sagging of the roof ribs.”

The contemporary cantilever-beam article described the working device as two parallel plate girders, three and one-half feet deep and 60 feet long, spaced six feet apart and tied together with cross frames and bracing. The patent described the apparatus in part as two forty-eight-inch I-beam girders, also 60 feet long, cross-braced on six-foot centers. The difference in description may reflect source language, iteration, or the distinction between public engineering article and patent specification. The essential point is the same: the beam carried the wall plates and roof timbering from above while men removed the bench below. It bought working room inside bad ground.

Under the older I-beam system, crews considered it unsafe to remove more than six feet of bench at one operation. With the cantilever beam, seventeen feet could be “shot,” mucked, and supported in one cycle. The time required for one cycle fell from twenty-four hours to eighteen, and less as the gangs gained experience. The article estimated that, by completion, the device would save the Tunnel Commission “over 2,500,000 dollars in labor costs alone.” That is the kind of figure that gets printed in newspapers. The more important point was underground. The beam held back danger long enough for men to work. It turned improvisation into method.

The scale of the work remained enormous. Estimates placed total rock excavation at 522,500 cubic yards. Men worked eight-hour shifts day and night. Electricity for lighting and power came from a station on South Boulder Creek. Direct current of 250 volts drove mucking machines, electric locomotives, blowers, and other equipment. Compressed air traveled through an eight-inch line in the water tunnel, then through smaller pipes into the crosscuts. Fresh air was crucial, and each portal had a ventilating plant capable of delivering about 25,000 cubic feet of fresh air per minute to the headings.

The tunnel was an enterprise, but it was also two towns, a workplace, and a culture. Newspaper advertisements still called for labor in blunt terms: “MUCKERS WANTED: For Moffat Tunnel, $3.25 per day of 8 hours, room and board included, 7 days per week. Apply room 203 Club bldg., 1731 Arapahoe.”

There were ceremonies too. F.C. Hitchcock and Stanley Watt went to East Portal to attend a B. P. O. E. initiation ceremony, the Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks bringing fraternal life into a construction camp nestled into the far west end of the Tolland Valley. Baseball was in the air as well. On May 9, the Rocky Mountain News reported: “Teams are being organized at Woods Lumber camp, West Portal, Tabernash, and Granby. Many fast Denver players will play on the clubs.” Those details reminds us that the men who drilled, mucked, timbered, pumped, and blasted also needed something beyond rock and wages. They needed teams. They needed a Saturday night. They needed a reason to look up from the work.

Even children were building the tunnel in miniature. The Steamboat Pilot noted on May 19 that a model Moffat Tunnel had been built on a table in a sixth-grade room. There were “the portals, East and West, with the buildings, the entrance to the tunnel, the tracks, the cars and the steam shovel and every detail of the camps.” James Peak rose above it, snowcapped, with timberline, dense green forest at the base, and even a fire-swept area in view. The tunnel had become more than infrastructure. It had entered the imagination of Colorado’s classrooms and inspired the next generation.

The first train through was still estimated for July 21, 1927. That date would not hold, but in May 1926 it still offered the public something to grip. A finish line. A promise… and those promises were being tested. More bonds would be needed to complete the Moffat Tunnel.

One article wrote that the Moffat Tunnel Commission was having “a bushel of trouble with the job of putting the big hole through James Peak.” The west side had bad ground that crushed heavy timbers. The east side had water. Then the writer added a wicked twist: “Then, besides all this, a heavy flow of gas has been encountered.” This gas, however, was “struck many miles from the actual workings—in fact it eminates from the Champa Street Temple of Injustice.” The charge was that public criticism was being used “to lead people to believe that the members of the Commission are a bunch of incompetents and grafters.” The humor was sharp because the stakes were serious. The tunnel had become a test of public trust.

The critics had their own language. One editorial declared: “SLOWLY, but surely, Denver is waking up to the fact that it has a double-barreled white elephant on its hands in the Moffat Tunnel.” It argued that the estimated cost was about twice what had been represented, predicted a final cost of $20,000,000, and concluded that the tunnel might be worth its cost only if it taught voters to “QUIT VOTING BONDS.” That quote shows that skepticism was not marginal. The opposition saw the project as a financial trap, a public-works warning, and a burden Denver had brought upon itself. The argument was harsh, but it asked a fair question: what happens when a civic dream costs far more than promised?

Other voices answered just as forcefully. One editorial defended the additional $3,500,000 bond issue with practical restraint: “It was necessary to raise it and it was raised and the money is in the bank.” The commissioners, it argued, had been appointed to perform “a certain task, piercing a great mountain,” and no one could know exactly what kind of material lay inside. The real failure would have been to spend the existing money and leave the work unfinished.

Another defended the secrecy of the financing with almost cheerful combativeness. The Denver Post had accused the commission of raising money “secretly.” The reply: the commissioners should be credited for having “enough business acumen not to have announced to the Denver Post what its plans were.” Mr. Bonfils had reportedly said, “You’ll never get another dime.” The editorial answered with certainty: “the tunnel must be completed—and it will be completed.”

The financial facts were formidable. The new loan of $3,500,000 brought total obligations of the Moffat Tunnel District to $12,720,000. The lender was R. M. Grant & Co. of New York, which had also handled the original $6,720,000 bond issue and the second supplemental issue of $2,500,000. The commission’s formal statement placed the interest rate at 5¼ percent, with bonds to be retired in ten equal annual installments beginning January 1, 1947, and ending January 1, 1956. The legality of the issue was reportedly approved by Storey, Thorndyke and Ware of Boston, and James H. Pershing of Denver.

The raw clippings do not entirely agree on every financial detail. One article printed the new loan at 5½ percent, and an Associated Press item gave the principal retirement period as 1947 to 1965. Because the commission statement and other fuller accounts give 5¼ percent and 1947 to 1956, those are the figures used here, with the newspaper discrepancies best treated as part of the period record rather than silently harmonized.

W. N. W. Blayney, one of the commissioners, framed the matter as duty rather than choice. “Under the Moffat Tunnel law it was made mandatory on the Moffat Tunnel Commission to build the Moffat Tunnel,” he said. “The tunnel is going to be built.” He went further: “Even if we were of a mind, which we are not, to let the project drop, to let the $10,000,000 which has been invested in it go—the cost to be borne by the people of the Moffat Tunnel district without a return on the investment—we could not. At any time any taxpayer could mandamus us to proceed if we stopped.” The commission was not just fighting geology. It was bound by law, debt, expectation, and the fear of wasting what had already been spent. Blayney called it plainly: “We would have liked to put through the tunnel without raising money; would have lived to have built it for nothing, but it is facts we are facing.”

Blayney also explained how the burden was expected to be divided. The Denver & Salt Lake railroad had contracted to rent the railroad bore at an amount sufficient to pay interest on and retire two-thirds of the two previous bond issues, plus a possible additional $1,000,000 after those issues were paid. The remainder would depend on water tunnel rentals, with any balance falling to taxpayers of the Moffat Tunnel District, of which Denver constituted 88 percent. The more the city paid for water-tunnel rental, the smaller the amount to be raised by direct taxation.

At the same time, the railroad that would use the tunnel was being reorganized. The way was being cleared for settlement of claims totaling $355,700 against the Denver & Salt Lake Railroad, then in receivership. After foreclosure and auction, the reorganized company would carry nearly the same name, except “Railroad” would become “Railway.” The plan meant to put the Moffat road on its feet in time to use the tunnel.

Formal application was made to the Interstate Commerce Commission for authority to issue the securities needed for reorganization: $2,500,000 in first mortgage 6 percent gold bonds, $11,000,000 in income mortgage bonds with interest limited to 6 percent, and 50,000 shares of no-par common stock. The $2,500,000 first mortgage bonds were to bring “new money” into the system. Oil discoveries in Routt and Moffat counties had improved revenue, with more than 1,000 tank cars, more than half of Colorado’s entire oil production, reportedly handled each month. That increase helped hasten the reorganization.

The tunnel’s future depended on use. It had to be finished, leased, traveled, and paid for. Without railroad rental and water-bore revenue, the burden would remain with taxpayers.

The water bore became a second battleground. “WATER AND THE TUNNEL,” a letter to the Rocky Mountain News, opened with a striking comparison: “The development of propaganda, like that of tear gas, is one of the results of the world war. It is a very powerful weapon when unscrupulously used. Public opinion is unthinking and easily swayed.”

The writer argued that Denver had once been overwhelmingly enthusiastic, but public opinion had shifted because of two causes: the increased cost and the commission’s refusal to lease the water privilege to a private corporation. The letter then widened the map. Transcontinental railroads opposed a shorter route to Salt Lake City. Eastern slope coal interests disliked the prospect of western slope coal reaching their markets. California water interests, according to the writer, were prepared to fight diversion from the western to the eastern slope. Hearst newspapers entered the story. So did the Fraser River company.

These claims should be read as a polemical letter, not neutral fact. Still, they show how widely the tunnel’s meaning had spread. By May 1926, the project was no longer only about a railroad bore through James Peak. It was about western slope coal, Front Range water, Denver taxation, California anxiety, newspaper power, and whether a public improvement district could carry an undertaking whose geology refused to cooperate.

The letter’s geology was blunt: “Unfortunately, instead of solid granite the interior of James Peak seems to be made up largely of very soft, disintegrated rock and mud, accompanied by a vast volume of water running at times as high as 3,000 gallons per minute.” Engineers had expected 2,000 feet of soft ground; the writer had been told timbering would be needed for more than 18,000 feet. The criticism of the commissioners was almost sympathetic: “My only criticism of these gentlemen is that they were silly enough to take on the thankless task with the vast uncertainties connected with any project of this character.”

Another editorial, “Complete the Tunnel,” took the long view. “Hindsight is not hard to acquire; even a fool may have it.” If the commission had possessed “X-ray penetration to look into the heart of the Divide,” it would have adjusted. But it did not. No one did. The editorial accepted that the total cost, including the water bore, would be about double the original estimates, then asked the essential question: stop and lose the $9,000,000 already expended, or go ahead? Its answer was direct: “The tunnel must be completed without delay.” The article also made a remarkable prediction about the water bore, calling it something that “some day will be more valuable to this city than the whole cost of the twin-tunnel.” The Moffat Tunnel was sold to the public as a railroad project, but its water function was already understood as a long-range municipal asset.

By late May, John Vipond Davies, a consulting engineer with major tunnel experience, arrived with reassurance. “The Moffat Tunnel, as far as the railroad tunnel is concerned, will be finished almost exactly on the time planned, despite the fact that the east and west headings may not be united until possibly two months later than the time set,” he said. Davies’ calm was nearly theatrical. He had spent one day at each portal and returned to the Brown Palace Hotel, where he said the work was “entirely satisfactory and perfectly normal.” The water, he said, was nothing unusual. “Where they found a flow of from 1,000 to 5,000 gallons a minute, we ran into 10,000 gallons a minute in the Astoria tunnel. So you can see we were worse off than they were here.” He explained that crews had gone through the fissure that brought water down from the glacial moraine above, and that they had hit the best rock yet encountered. The rock was worse than expected, but that was tunnel work: “a man drilling a tunnel never knows from one day to the next just what kind of rock he is going to strike. That’s one thing which makes it interesting.”

Davies described a belt of about 150 feet of mica schist full of water. Native timbers had been crushed. Twelve-inch Oregon fir also failed. Larger Oregon fir, protected by steel caps, was proving satisfactory. His final message was steady: “There is nothing to fear, nothing to worry about. The conditions encountered have been normal, the work is satisfactory, and the completed project will be ready just about on time.”

Yet May also carried warnings that could not be brushed aside. On May 3, the Boulder Daily Camera reported that E. H. Brines and his brother Charles were burned when lightning exploded a transformer in the hydraulic plant of the Public Service Company in Boulder Canyon. Burning oil and smoke filled the room. The transformer was ruined, insulators were broken, and the interior had to be repainted. The outage affected the mountain district, and “The Moffat Tunnel construction was slowed up for the period of outage.”

The tunnel depended on men, machines, electricity, air, timber, rails, pumps, and weather. A lightning strike miles away could slow the work beneath the Divide. Everything was connected.

Then came the month’s most sobering warning, from The Holy Cross Trail on May 8, addressed “To Governor Morley.” The letter opened without ceremony: “We have a job for our mine inspector that should be attended to at once. Or one of these fine days we will be shocked by reading of a shift of miners being caught like rats in a trap. It is at the Moffat Tunnel.” By July, those words would read less like a warning and more like a prophecy. In the letter, the concern focused on escape. At the East Portal, the pilot tunnel and railroad tunnel were in about the same distance, with crosscuts every few hundred feet. At the West Portal, the pilot tunnel extended past a crosscut by several thousand feet through heavy ground. The writer feared that a cave-in could trap a shift at the breast “with no means of escape,” hold water back, and drown the men. The comparison to Red Cliff was pointed: “Here in Red Cliff a mine inspector required one of our companies to dig an extra man hole, for only 240 feet of an incline.”

The letter closed with civic insistence: “We are just telling you this Governor. As you are the chief executive of the State. And a part of your business to see that miners lives are duly safeguarded by your understudies the mine inspectors.”

Lewis’ invention reduced danger, but it did not erase risk. Confidence from consulting engineers, financial resolve from commissioners, and new steel inside the mountain did not change the fact that men were still entering headings where water, pressure, and collapse could outrun every plan.

May 1926 was not one story. It was a full stack of them. East Portal found hard rock. West Portal still squeezed timber and patience. George Lewis’ patented method and apparatus continued to give the builders a way to hold the mountain open while the bench came out below. Muckers were wanted. Elks gathered. Baseball teams formed. A sixth-grade model brought James Peak into a classroom. A transformer exploded. The railroad reorganized. Bonds were sold. Water politics flared. Skeptics called the tunnel a white elephant. Supporters answered that abandonment would waste everything already invested. Engineers smiled and called the chaos normal.

The mountain kept its own ledger.

A century later, that ledger remains useful. It reminds us that great public works are rarely clean stories of progress. They are arguments with geology, finance, politics, technology, labor, and public trust. The Moffat Tunnel survived May 1926 because its builders, commissioners, critics, and defenders all understood the same uncomfortable truth from different angles: once Colorado had gone this deep into the Divide, failure would cost more than completion. And somewhere beneath James Peak, amid water, timber, steel, and the breath of ventilating fans, the men kept going.

B. Travis Wright, MPS | Preserve Rollins Pass | May 17, 2026

Want to uncover more incredible Moffat Tunnel stories? Our blog is filled with deeper dives into its history, untold tales, and connections to Rollins Pass. Explore more and journey through time with us!

The primary purpose of our work is to inform the public.

• Facebook
• Mail
• Twitter
• Amazon
• Goodreads
• YouTube
• LinkedIn

In April 1926, it was “one wet thing” at the East Portal, crushing ground at the West, and a single storm that cut power to the pumps holding the project together.

Moffat Tunnel Construction Happenings from 100 Years Ago

April 1926 arrived with the East Portal sounding like a modern-day water park: “Water from a subterranean stream is pouring out of the East Portal of the Moffat Tunnel at a rate of 1,500 gallons a minute.” The blunt follow-up a few weeks later—“…the East Portal of the Moffat Tunnel is one wet thing that is causing a lot of trouble.”—captures why April 1926’s story can’t be told as steady forward motion. The breakthrough traced back to the night of February 28, when the east railroad heading unexpectedly hit what accounts called a hidden subterranean stream, flooding headings back to Crosscut No. 10 and spilling into lower workings. In April, the mountain’s message was simple: drill all you want, but first you’ll learn to manage water.

Engineers did learn—fast, and expensively. Inflow held “stubbornly at around 1,500 gallons per minute, day and night,” and by early April more than 200 acre-feet—over sixty-seven million gallons—was estimated to have drained out since the breakthrough. With no permanent system ready for that volume, crews rushed two large centrifugal pumps on flatcars, drove more than a thousand feet of discharge pipe, and inched the equipment toward the face as levels dropped. When the flow eased—down toward 700 gallons per minute—men reentered a heading packed with rock and debris, working knee-deep while fighting fresh silt washing back in from reopened channels. Officials later called conditions “encouraging,” yet that optimism still meant hundreds of gallons per minute and a daily battle that could erase progress overnight.

On the West Portal, April’s threat was not flood, but pressure—ground that behaved like a slow, unrelenting clamp. The headings there ran through “slippery, blocky, heavy” material that demanded near-constant timbering, and around 12,300 feet in, the stress visibly overcame the supports. Heavy 12×12-inch Oregon fir timbers—described as capable of withstanding thousands of pounds per square inch—“bowed like bent bows,” ceiling pieces splintered, uprights shifted, and “only the narrowest margin prevented a general cave-in.” Roughly thirty feet of timbering had to be replaced, and as many as 150 men were temporarily withdrawn until the supports could be made secure. If the East Portal showed how quickly nature could halt excavation, the West Portal showed how easily it could compress human confidence.

Even so, the camps kept generating the quiet evidence of a community trying to be more than a worksite. “News comes from West Portal of the birth of a daughter, Geraldine, one April 14 to Mr. And Mrs. Ed Jenkins,” with the note that the mother was formerly Miss Eunice Hamidy of Oak Creek and that Jenkins served as assistant chief electrical engineer. Marriage notices carried their own miniature geography of the tunnel district: “Fred W. Raddatz, West Portal, Colo., and Irene N. Porter, 2622 West Twenty-fourth avenue, Denver,” and later Claude R. Booth and Maurine Jewel Smith, with the detail that she “has been making her home at the Western Portal of Moffat Tunnel… with her mother,” and that “For the present the bride and groom will make their home at West Portal.” April’s hardships did not pause the human urge to set down roots, pair up, and persist.

Money, meanwhile, sharpened April’s tensions because it tied the public project directly to the daily lives of the workers. Profits from “commissaries, canteens, and recreation halls” were described as a meaningful offset to construction costs: commissioner Charles H. Leckenby reported earnings already at $208,000, with expectations of exceeding a quarter-million before completion, and the commission emphasized its decision not to lease concessions to private operators. But the same month preserved the opposing moral ledger: a critical editorial said the commissioners were “boast[ing]” about… commissary income, portraying those earnings as coming at the expense of the workforce, even as coverage referenced the practical work of provisioning through figures like West Portal commissary supervisor Robert E. Norvell. The argument wasn’t just about dollars; it was about who the project was really serving, and who was paying for that claim.

Late April then exposed a different kind of fragility: dependence on surface systems that could fail in a single storm. Severe Front Range weather broke power and telephone transmission lines, and the outage—explicitly tied to Thursday, April 22—cut electricity to the East Portal pumps that held back the continuing flow. With pumps down, east-side headings, including the pioneer bore, flooded, telephone service dropped, and repairs were not completed until Saturday, when lines were restored and work was said to have “resumed” in the west headings. In parallel, editorials framed the tunnel as a political and financial overreach sold through “propaganda,” with one writer insisting that “Denver bit like a sucker,” and warning that any water-transfer scheme would require siphon pressure and might demand steel lining “as strong as a boiler of a Mallet engine,” while reservoir sites “positively can not be used.” The same voices called the finances “crooked as a dog’s hind leg,” pointed to tunnel district taxes “around seven percent,” and claimed the commission had “hypnotized the city and the legislature,” noting the east side had been “85 per cent finished” yet idle “for 50 days.”

Against that backdrop, one contemporary columnist dismissed the men building the Moffat Tunnel as naïve for thinking history would care, arguing that even a bronze nameplate at the portal would be meaningless a hundred years later. April 1926 reads like a month designed to tempt that kind of cynicism: water that would not stop, ground that would not hold, storms that could silence the pumps, and critics eager to turn every delay into a verdict. Yet the opposite happened almost right away. Within just a few years, engineering students were traveling to the tunnel to study its construction firsthand, treating it as a living laboratory in geology, ventilation, design, and public-works problem-solving. A century later, that pattern continues. The tunnel is still examined in classrooms, researchers still revisit the technical record, and historians still work to preserve the human and engineering story behind it. Instead of fading into irrelevance, the project became exactly what the columnist doubted it ever would: a long-term resource for science, education, and public understanding, carried forward by the workers, families, camps, setbacks, and recoveries that are, in fact, still being read.

B. Travis Wright, MPS | Preserve Rollins Pass | April 26, 2026

Want to uncover more incredible Moffat Tunnel stories? Our blog is filled with deeper dives into its history, untold tales, and connections to Rollins Pass. Explore more and journey through time with us!

The primary purpose of our work is to inform the public.

• Facebook
• Mail
• Twitter
• Amazon
• Goodreads
• YouTube
• LinkedIn

In March 1926 at the Moffat Tunnel, thirty days of water stalled the headings, the city’s faith in the project faltered, and the cost of the work could no longer be treated as abstract.

Moffat Tunnel Construction Happenings from 100 Years Ago

March 1926 was the month when the Moffat Tunnel looked numerically close and operationally fragile at the same time—a combination that can be more dangerous than being obviously far from the finish line. Early in the month, officials said the two main headings were separated by only 5,568 feet. Progress, when reduced to percentages, sounded almost like a victory lap: the water tunnel and the main headings at 85 percent complete, crosscuts at 88 percent, and the enlargement of the full-size railroad bore at 56 percent. Yet the same reporting carried a sobering counterweight. As the remaining distance shrank into “mere thousands of feet,” the mountain was proving more unpredictable than at any earlier stage.

The month’s defining setback began with a single blasting round the night of February 28 into March 1 in the water tunnel, when the shot broke abruptly into an underground stream. At first, the inflow was estimated at roughly 3,000 gallons per minute, later described as settling nearer 1,500. The more consequential detail was not the early peak but the persistence. A report published March 31 stated the flow had continued “unabated for 30 days,” which meant March unfolded under a constant hydraulic burden rather than a short-lived incident. Earlier water strikes in the tunnel, it was emphasized, had typically dwindled within a few days. This one did not. That difference in behavior mattered because it shifted the problem from an emergency to a condition—something crews had to live with, work around, and pay for, day after day.

The trouble was concentrated at the East Portal, and geography made it worse at precisely the wrong moment. By then, the east-side heading had crossed the apex and was driving downgrade toward the west. Under ordinary circumstances at the Moffat Tunnel, gravity is a quiet ally: water tends to find its way out of a tunnel toward daylight. Here, gravity became the opponent. Instead of draining out, the water backed into the workings, flooding headings, overwhelming the pumps that were already in place, and forcing workers to remove machinery before it disappeared under rising water. In a project built on planning and repetition, this was the kind of reversal that punishes assumptions. The heading was not merely wet; it was in the wrong position to shed water without sustained mechanical effort.

Engineers tried to quantify the scale of the problem in a way the public could grasp. They estimated that 67,320,000 gallons (modern day note: this amount of water could fill ~102 Olympic-size swimming pools) had poured through during the first month alone. They also reached a conclusion that sounded technical but carried practical dread: they believed the water was Western Slope water traveling eastward. They called it the least favorable hydraulic condition they could imagine. The phrase did not mean water was “bad” in the abstract. It meant the source appeared capable of feeding the bore persistently from the far side of the Divide, making it harder to expect a natural tapering or an easy relief through drainage.

Water, however, was only part of the mechanism. The blast did not merely open a clean conduit; it broke into crushed, running material—“ground-up rock… like cement.” Tons of this muck poured into the heading along with the inflow, burying the work and halting progress for extended periods. That detail changes the picture. Flooding is one kind of disruption. Flooding combined with unstable, self-feeding debris becomes something else entirely: a cycle in which clearing the face does not reliably create progress, because the face can refill. In that environment, “advance” is not a simple matter of more men or longer shifts. It becomes a contest between excavation and re-accumulation.

The response was an exercise in containment rather than cure. Pumps were brought up and kept running, and the water had to be forced up to the apex so it could then drain for miles to the portal. A weir was built to measure the flow, because a project cannot manage what it cannot measure, and earlier experience was no longer a trustworthy guide. To regain control at the source, a drift was driven from the pioneer bore—forty to fifty feet ahead of the railroad heading—to crosscut the vein. Blocking the flow entirely remained under discussion, which is another way of acknowledging that the problem did not present a single obvious remedy. In March, the East Portal was not “behind schedule” so much as locked in a tactical struggle where each option carried costs, uncertainties, and consequences that could not be wished away.

Conditions on the West Portal offered no comfort. That side was described as a “veritable hoodoo,” a phrase that reads like gallows humor from people forced to keep working where the ground refuses to behave. Timbering was relentless, and the accounts stressed that nearly every foot required support. Heavy steel beams were installed in places to restrain slipping walls. Engineers projected more than nine million feet of timber—much of it Oregon fir—would be needed before unstable sections could be secured. March thus became a month of two simultaneous fights: at one end, water and running muck; at the other, ground that demanded timber and steel simply to remain in place long enough for the work to continue.

Even with the East Portal slowed to “practically a standstill” for about a month, officials insisted the project remained about five months ahead of schedule. That claim carried its own pressure. To hole through in July, the accounts said the headings would need to average forty feet of daily progress once normal work resumed. That number matters because it reveals how narrow the margin could become once trouble arrived. A schedule can absorb setbacks when it has slack. A schedule that requires an aggressive daily average turns recovery into a separate risk—one that can tempt corners to be cut, judgment to be rushed, and safety procedures to become “flexible” under the weight of public expectation.

Labor scaled accordingly. The workforce rose to roughly 600 men, the largest since construction began. Supervisors were quoted acknowledging that younger miners were preferred for the hardest assignments because they could better withstand smoke and the conditions inside the mountain. The statement is plain, even clinical, yet it exposes a reality that polite progress reports can conceal: endurance itself had become part of the project’s calculus. March was not only a matter of engineering quantities—feet, gallons, timbers—but of how long nerve and sinew could keep functioning inside an environment that was cold, dark, wet, loud, and increasingly unforgiving.

Amid the flood and the timber, the human cost of the work returned to the foreground in the death of Charles Cecil “Charley” Decker, almost certainly eighteen, though some newspapers misstated his age. A mucker at the West Portal for only about a month, he was struck by a slab of roof rock after a blasting round. The reports emphasized that he entered before loose material had been fully scaled. The slab hit with enough force to break ribs, leg, pelvic bone, and back, and to cause catastrophic internal injuries. He was taken to the West Portal hospital, and from the outset his condition was described as hopeless. He lived nearly a day—long enough for his parents to reach him—before dying.

The tributes that followed were not generic. They were specific in a way that suggests a community trying to explain, to itself, why this loss felt so sharply personal. Decker was described as physically strong and unusually upright—“morally clean,” a boy who “stood out from among boys.” One line captured the kind of memory that refuses to be reduced to an accident report: “his smile will always remain with us.” Funeral services in Yampa drew a wide circle of relatives, neighbors, and lifelong friends. Local young men served as pallbearers. Musical tributes were offered. He was buried in Yampa cemetery, mourned by his parents, four surviving brothers, and his grandmother. Newspapers wrote that his death cast “a deep gloom” across the region because he was just entering early manhood and was held in universal esteem. In March 1926, the tunnel’s progress could be counted in feet, but its cost was being counted in names.

While crews fought geology underground, Denver fought politics above it, and March reads like the moment the project’s civic narrative began to fracture under its own weight. As financial and governance realities became harder to soften with optimism, newspapers began to speak in a different register. One blunt line framed the shift in public mood: “Gradually it seems to be dawning on Denver that their Moffat Tunnel is going to be the very biggest white elephant they ever purchased.” That language was not merely colorful. It signaled a fear that the tunnel was becoming a permanent obligation rather than a triumphant public work—an asset that would demand continual explanation, continual funding, and continual defense.

Much of the dispute focused on structure: who held risk, who controlled decisions, and who would be forced to pay when nature imposed costs beyond anyone’s preference. Critics hammered on the idea that Denver owned the overwhelming share of the enterprise and would bear the same share of any losses, whether the bookkeeping ran through the tunnel district or the water system. The point was framed as an uncomfortable inevitability: it could “look like a difference over a matter of bookkeeping,” yet still end with the same payer, in roughly the same proportion, regardless of which political faction prevailed in the argument.

City Attorney Henry May pressed the legal vulnerability of the arrangements with language that invited skepticism rather than deference. He called the structure “full of flaws and of at least doubtful validity,” then framed the question that makes any open-ended public commitment feel intolerable: if supplemental bonds could be issued, “how do we know what amount of bonds will be issued?” He also pointed to the absence of a reporting requirement—“no provision… requiring the commission to report to anyone” how or when money was to be spent. The attack landed not only because it questioned a policy choice, but also because it questioned the presence of guardrails. In public finance, distrust tends to metastasize fastest where oversight feels optional.

Liability anxieties attached themselves to the water bore in particular, and that is where technical misunderstanding became political fuel. Critics seized on the claim that the water tunnel was placed “above” the railroad tunnel, then asked a question designed to sound like common sense: “Why was the water tunnel placed above the railroad tunnel? Everyone knows that water usually runs downward, and not up.” As an engineering premise, the “directly overhead” framing is not consistent with the side-by-side configuration described in the material at hand, but politically the claim did not need to be geometrically perfect to be damaging. It needed only to feel plausible long enough to harden suspicion. The result was a public argument in which the same words—“leaks,” “percolations,” “damage”—could be used to frame the commission as careless, evasive, or both.

The political consequences arrived quickly and personally. A headline described a “brutal attack on water commissioners” that caused three men to resign, calling them “able and high-minded,” and noting that the mayor had difficulty finding replacements with comparable ability. That detail matters because governance capacity is not infinite. When qualified people walk away, the institution loses competence at the moment it most needs steadiness. The dispute thus threatened not only the tunnel’s reputation but the practical quality of decision-making while the project remained exposed to geological surprises.

By late March, even former boosters were framed as conceding that Denver was trapped by its own stake. One line summed up the predicament with coarse directness: “Denver is in a hel-uv-a-fix. For she must eventually extinguish 85% of the cost of the big bore whether she wishes to or not.” Another remark, steeped in fatalism, pointed to “years of litigation and trouble” and the chorus of “I told you so.” The press, in this portrayal, was not merely reporting disagreement. It was documenting a civic mood shifting from optimism to suspicion, from pride to anxiety, and from “when will it be finished” to “what have we committed ourselves to, and who will be accountable if it goes wrong.”

Yet March also contained an impulse to stabilize meaning before events stabilized on their own. An “official history” of the tunnel—written by Edgar McMechen and to be issued by Wahlgren Publishing—was endorsed by the Denver Chamber of Commerce directors, after earlier endorsement by the commission. The move reads like an attempt to consolidate legitimacy at a moment when legitimacy was fraying. In a large public enterprise, narrative becomes a form of governance. When the ground turns wet, and politics turns hot, whoever controls the frame can influence whether the next setback is treated as an unfortunate chapter in a heroic story or as proof that the entire undertaking was flawed from the start.

That was March 1926 in its clearest shape: measurable proximity to completion, paired with conditions that made completion feel less assured; mechanical persistence underground, paired with institutional instability above it; and a community’s grief for one young man, paired with a city’s fear that the costs—financial, legal, and moral—were only beginning to come due.

B. Travis Wright, MPS | Preserve Rollins Pass | March 1, 2026

Want to uncover more incredible Moffat Tunnel stories? Our blog is filled with deeper dives into its history, untold tales, and connections to Rollins Pass. Explore more and journey through time with us!

The primary purpose of our work is to inform the public.

• Facebook
• Mail
• Twitter
• Amazon
• Goodreads
• YouTube
• LinkedIn

When was the Moffat Tunnel opening date? It depends on whether you’re holding a drill bit, a golden telegraph key, or a train schedule.

• Saturday, February 12, 1927 — The pioneer bore was first holed through with a three-inch drill, establishing contact between East and West Portal.
• Friday, February 18, 1927 — President Calvin Coolidge, from Washington, ceremonially blasted the final rock of the pioneer bore by touching a golden telegraph key, symbolically completing the connection.
• Friday, July 8, 1927 — The main railroad bore was holed through “shortly before” 2 p.m. near Crosscut No. 9. This connected the two sides in full, though months of enlargement and finishing work still remained before the tunnel was usable for rail traffic.
• Saturday, December 10, 1927 — The final charges of dynamite were fired in the railroad tunnel, opening it to full size. Still remaining: concreting, equipment removal, and laying track.
• Tuesday, February 7, 1928 — Standard-gauge track through the Moffat Tunnel was officially completed, just under three weeks before what would become opening day. Work could not begin until the week of January 15, when crews first removed the temporary narrow-gauge rails that had carried muck cars and other construction equipment.

In project terms, these were successive construction milestones, each advancing the tunnel from excavation to full operation. Completion depends on which milestone one recognizes as decisive:

If you’re an engineer — February 12.
If you’re a president — February 18.
If you’re a construction superintendent — July 8.
If you’re a powderman — December 10.
If you’re a railroad — February 7.

If you’re waiting for the first official train? Pack your bags for February 26, 1928.

Ninety-eight years ago this week, David Moffat’s dream became operational reality. A train ran beneath the Continental Divide—but the path to that moment was neither singular nor simple. If you’ve followed our month-by-month account of the Moffat Tunnel’s construction over the past several years, you know the work was anything but straightforward, and we are nearing the most difficult phase. Ahead lie stalled headings and collapsing ground, heartbreaking fatalities, flashes of raw heroism for a friend, a small life saved through the newly pierced pioneer bore, a blacksmith shop fire in the dead of winter that threatened an entire camp, and the long grind that turned blasted rock into a reliable route. Even the bronze “1927” on the portals has its own subtle history. Early photographs seem to tell a slightly different story—one we’ll examine next year.

A century ago, crews were enduring some of the harshest conditions of the entire undertaking. Two years remain before the 1928 centennial of the first train. Join us as we continue telling the full story behind one of the most consequential American engineering achievements of its era and how the tunnel was won.

B. Travis Wright, MPS | Preserve Rollins Pass | February 26, 2026

Want to uncover more incredible Moffat Tunnel stories? Our blog is filled with deeper dives into its history, untold tales, and connections to Rollins Pass. Explore more and journey through time with us!

The primary purpose of our work is to inform the public.

• Facebook
• Mail
• Twitter
• Amazon
• Goodreads
• YouTube
• LinkedIn

February 1926 was the month the Moffat Tunnel clawed its way deeper under the Divide; the mountain reminded everyone it wasn’t giving up the fight for free.

Moffat Tunnel Construction Happenings from 100 Years Ago

By February 1926, the Moffat Tunnel had advanced to a threshold moment that felt both triumphant and unfinished. The Commission’s progress report dated February 1 stated that the main headings of both the railroad tunnel and the parallel water tunnel were now roughly four-fifths driven under James Peak. Nearly 26,000 feet of heading had been excavated from the two portals combined, leaving about 6,500 feet before the mountain would finally give way and the headings meet. Yet this was progress measured in narrow terms. Enlargement of the railroad bore—shaping the heading into a full-size operational tunnel—lagged far behind. Just over 17,000 feet had been widened to final dimensions, slightly more than half the length of the bore. The project’s two ends told different stories: excessive water that had plagued the East Portal was finally under control, while firmer rock in the west allowed the work to proceed with less timbering at daily rates as high as twenty to twenty-five feet. Engineers sounded cautiously confident that holing through could occur later in the year. Still, everyone understood that “holing through” was only one milestone on a much longer road to completion.

Even as miners carved into the heart of the mountain, the West Portal continued to function as an established community rather than a temporary work camp. Newspaper accounts describe active fraternal life at the site, including Elks initiations held in a recreation hall large enough for ritual ceremonies and a banquet space capable of feeding nearly ninety people. The lodge itself counted at least forty-five members. Corporate leadership did not stand apart from this social world. George Lewis, identified as the tunnel’s general manager, presided as toastmaster, a detail that illustrates how fully management and community overlapped at West Portal. The gatherings stretched late into the night, with attendees not departing until after 2:40 a.m.—a small but telling marker of stability, continuity, and infrastructure rooted firmly in a place that outsiders might otherwise mistake for a remote construction front.

That social fabric was punctured on February 10, when John Charles “Jack” Davis died at the West Portal. Born in April 1880 in Osborne County, Kansas, Davis had taken supervisory work at the western end of the tunnel. Family testimony holds that he was inspecting timbering inside the bore when he was struck or injured. That scenario fits the known hazards of underground work, yet the contemporary record is nearly silent. No detailed news report has surfaced to confirm the mechanism of death. Instead, all that appears publicly is a sparse mortuary line, “Died—Davis, John Davis, at West Portal, Colo. Remains at Horan & Son funeral chapel. Funeral notice later.” For a project whose accidents had become part of a statewide conversation about cost, risk, and delay, that silence stands out. The historian must therefore treat each possible explanation as a hypothesis rather than a conclusion: the cause could have been medical rather than industrial; the contractor may have categorized the event as routine; or notice of the incident may survive only in lost or inaccessible newspapers. What we do know with reasonable confidence is that Horan & Son transported Davis to Denver before he was buried in the Elks Rest section of Sunnyside Cemetery in Victor, Colorado. Interment there strongly implies—though it does not conclusively prove—Elks affiliation, likely through the Victor lodge. Fraternal networks often handled death logistics internally, which may explain the absence of fuller obituary treatment in the press. His sinking grave marker, the thin archival footprint, and the weight of family memory together reveal how easily the life of a man working beneath the Continental Divide can drift toward the margins unless someone insists on preserving the fragments. (More on Davis and many other fatalities related to the Moffat Tunnel project can be viewed on our website.)

Two newspapers dated February 12 and 19 described major Elks events at the West Portal almost immediately after Davis’s burial in the Elks Rest section. Those reports record a large initiation and banquet, nearly ninety attendees, and the use of the local recreation hall for ceremonies. Whether the events were scheduled in advance or continued out of necessity, they unfolded only days after a death tied to the same workplace. The proximity is striking. Rather than pausing in the wake of loss, fraternal ritual continued openly, almost defiantly, at the logistical center of the project. Work, risk, grief, and social life had become tightly braided threads.

Another death in February 1926 tested the limits of institutional safety and later memory. Forest N. Snow was working inside the East Portal when a blast went off ahead of him. Both early reports and the Colorado Bureau of Mines investigation state that Snow and his partner, Tom Burke, returned toward the heading too soon and chose to walk back through the main bore rather than use the crosscut into the pioneer bore where fresh air was being forced. Snow collapsed after entering the gas-filled zone; Burke, though affected, survived and attempted rescue. The Bureau classified the incident as accidental asphyxiation caused by a violation of standing safety orders. In doing so, investigators wrote that the men had “deliberately” ignored the rule requiring use of the pioneer bore—language that, read in context, referred to a conscious decision to disregard instructions, not intent to die. That interpretation held at the time. Only in April 1928, well after the tunnel opened, did a lone retrospective account recast the event as suicide. That late claim collapses under scrutiny. Snow had a partner with him, the method offered no certainty of death, and the official investigation—conducted with immediate access to witnesses and tunnel rules—found no evidence of self-harm. Snow’s body went unclaimed at the morgue, and its final disposition remains unknown, but the historical record, when weighed by both proximity and evidentiary strength, resolves firmly back to accidental death.

Even in the midst of tragedy, the tunnel entered the national imagination. The film In the Heart of the Rockies included images of men working in and around the East Portal, placing the project within a larger visual story about the modern West. A radio broadcast that reflected on the construction effort used the line, “There were giants in those days,” signaling how the project was being mythologized even while the work remained incomplete.

That same narrative impulse soon reached print at a national scale. In June 1926, Sunset Magazine managing editor Edward A. Vandeventer published “Boring Through the Backbone of the American Continent,” a feature-length account of the tunnel as it neared completion. He framed the project as both an engineering feat and a geographic correction to the intractable reality of the Front Range, where for more than two hundred miles no river had cut a natural rail route through the Continental Divide. Vandeventer wrote that the tunnel would eliminate dozens of miles of four-percent grade over Rollins Pass. He understood Rollins Pass not as a fiasco, but as a costly proof-of-concept showing that winter made the mountain unconquerable from above, forcing the solution beneath it. His reporting was not abstract. Newspapers recorded his presence in Colorado, his time underground at the active headings, and his travel with resident engineer C. A. Betts. The tunnel in his account is not inevitable; it is precarious, still controversial, and financially strained. He emphasized that pairing the Moffat Tunnel with the proposed Dotsero cut-off would shorten the Denver–Salt Lake City line by 173 miles, possibly cutting six hours from schedules while recentering Denver on the national rail map. Even minor inconsistencies—such as variations in the spelling of his name in newspaper columns—hint at the urgency with which the story was being told. Two tunneling crews advanced toward each other through millions of tons of rock, with success to be measured, ultimately, not in miles gained, but inches missed.

February 1926 therefore exists at the intersection of progress reports, lived community, industrial hazard, and emerging myth. At West Portal, Elks ceremonies continued beneath winter sky and managerial oversight even as the men who worked below ground absorbed the risk. At East Portal, a split-second safety decision killed a worker and later invited distortion from a distance of years. And across the broader West, the tunnel increasingly appeared not merely as infrastructure but as a narrative—an audacious effort to correct geography itself. Contemporary rail reporting captured the practical benefit in stark terms. From Tabernash, three miles west of the tunnel, trains had previously needed fourteen to sixteen hours to reach Denver ninety miles away, requiring four locomotives to haul just twenty-two freight cars over the Divide. Once the tunnel opened, a single locomotive was expected to haul twenty-four cars from Tabernash to Denver in less than half that time. The promise was as concrete as it was transformative.

Taken together, the month reveals a paradox that defined the project at this stage. Under the mountain, the headings advanced methodically, supported by evolving safety systems that nevertheless failed at tragic moments. Outside the mountain, social bonds and fraternal ritual worked to stabilize a community living with constant risk. And beyond the mountain, the country began to imagine new maps made possible by a line bored straight through the Continental Divide. February 1926 was not yet a story of completion. It was the story of a gamble progressing toward resolution—its human cost increasingly visible, its technical achievement increasingly celebrated, and its ultimate meaning still being negotiated in real time.

B. Travis Wright, MPS | Preserve Rollins Pass | February 4, 2026

Want to uncover more incredible Moffat Tunnel stories? Our blog is filled with deeper dives into its history, untold tales, and connections to Rollins Pass. Explore more and journey through time with us!

The primary purpose of our work is to inform the public.

• Facebook
• Mail
• Twitter
• Amazon
• Goodreads
• YouTube
• LinkedIn

January 1926 was the month the Moffat Tunnel kept moving forward even as its human cost could no longer be ignored.

Moffat Tunnel Construction Happenings from 100 Years Ago

Late Saturday night, January 2, 1926—technically it was just after midnight on Sunday, January 3—three track workers, Peter Giacomelli, Dan Metroff, and Frank Christian, were deep inside the pioneer tunnel at the East Portal of the Moffat Tunnel when a scheduled dynamite blast in the main heading went off as expected. They had seen the familiar warning lights that told them the explosion was coming, and under normal conditions that mattered, because a canvas bulkhead separating the pioneer bore from the main workings was supposed to hold back the blast fumes long enough for the blowers to push fresh air ahead of the men. That temporary barrier was their only protection.

This time it failed. Whether “jerked aside,” “whipped by the force of the blast,” or “caught” on an obstruction, the news coverage converges on a single outcome: the bulkhead didn’t close, and explosive gases surged through crosscut No. 8 into the pioneer tunnel. The three workers were suddenly in a rising wave of toxic powder fumes, coughing, choking, and fighting to keep their footing, and they understood immediately what the failure meant. They had only one chance: reach the blowers and the cleaner air ahead. (Additional discussion of the blowers is included near the end of the article, where a substantially expanded caption provides further technical detail.)

For a brief stretch they pushed forward together through thickening fumes. Christian remained the strongest; the other two weakened first. As dizziness overtook them, Christian physically supported Giacomelli and Metroff, but eventually all three collapsed. Searchers entering the tunnel minutes later found them unconscious in the bore, overcome by the fumes the bulkhead should have held back, and rushed them to the tunnel mouth for emergency treatment. Giacomelli, age 21, died at 6:00am. Metroff died roughly two hours later. Christian, barely alive, was slipping toward the same fate.

What happened next became the subject of a medical retrospective printed about a year later. That article described how Dr. C. A. Sunderland, the East Portal physician, resorted to a then-extraordinary approach: he strapped an oxygen mask to the dying man and kept him breathing pure oxygen for more than six hours. At a time when prolonged oxygen therapy was still considered experimental, Sunderland’s decision was a deliberate gamble. According to the report, the patient revived and ultimately recovered, a result framed as an emerging milestone in medical practice. The timing, the number of victims, the mechanism of injury, and the fact that only one man survived all make clear that this retrospective describes Frank Christian, the sole survivor of the Giacomelli–Metroff accident. Indeed, an article published January 5, 1926 carried the headline “tunnel gas victim on way to recovery,” while the article reported that “Frank Christian… who was overcome by gas which caused the death of his two companions in the Moffat Tunnel late Saturday night, was reported to be on the road to recovery last night.”

Newspaper follow-ups tried to locate relatives, and those efforts pulled Denver’s street grid into a tragedy that had unfolded inside a remote bore. Metroff’s family could not be found. Giacomelli’s situation was more complex. Records linked him to a Denver boarding address—2134 California Street—and revealed he had married in September 1924. His wife had inexplicably vanished from the boarding house on December 29, telling her landlady she was leaving to join her husband at East Portal; four letters from him arrived afterward, suggesting he did not know she had gone. Giacomelli, who had begun tunnel work only days earlier on December 27, had spent much of his life with his aunt, Mrs. Mary Marcolina, now living with her son, Denver patrolman Otto P. Marcolina, at 2806 Clay Street. Another cousin, John P. Marcolina, worked as a mechanic for Colorado Iron and Metal and lived at 2614 West Ninth Avenue. The tunnel could take a man before the outside world even learned how to find his next of kin.

That human story arrived in January 1926 alongside a set of project-wide facts that made every incident harder to shrug off, because the tunnel had entered the phase where progress could be counted in finite, graspable distances. By this point in January 1926, the work was approximately three-quarters to four-fifths complete by footage, with slightly more than three-quarters of available funds expended, and close enough to breakthrough that the remaining distance was no longer measured in tens of thousands of feet. Semi-annual statements translated percentages into a concrete remainder, reporting that only 6,811 feet of rock remained to connect the headings of the water tunnel.

Work continued simultaneously from East Portal and West Portal, but conditions diverged in ways that shaped cost, pace, and risk. From the east, early construction benefited from hard rock, rapid drilling, and minimal timbering, allowing portions of the main tunnel to be cemented and effectively completed at an early stage. Engineers later marked a milestone when crews “crossed the hump,” completing excavation on the Atlantic slope of the Continental Divide and beginning the descent toward the Pacific side. That transition, however, coincided with escalating water incursions as the bore passed over the apex. Recurrent seams released flows ranging from 200 to 500 gallons per minute, flooding pilot bores, forcing temporary suspensions of work, and requiring four pumps to lift water back over the summit so gravity could carry it out through the portals.

At the west portal, water was less the story than soft, unstable ground. Nearly every foot required timbering, sometimes reinforced with iron beams and inspected daily to guard against slipping walls. Engineers compared these conditions to those encountered during construction of the St. Gotthard Tunnel, noting that progress there was more than a mile behind where it would have been had hard rock prevailed throughout. Even so, forecasts remained notably consistent. Commissioners and contractors repeatedly predicted the tunnel would be “holed through” in June or July 1926, with excavation of the railroad tunnel completed by December 1 and full railroad completion by January 1927, potentially six months ahead of contract time, even as the reporting candidly acknowledged delays from flooding and slower progress at West Portal.

Financially, the project was constrained but controlled. By January 7, total expenditures had reached $7.72 million out of aggregate receipts of roughly $10.8 million, with $3.56 million devoted directly to labor, supplies, and tunnel construction. Excavation costs for the water tunnel rose modestly—from $11.05 to $11.34 per cubic yard—yet remained well below the contractual upset price of $17, while the cost of railroad tunnel enlargement declined during the same period. Interest on bonds was substantial, but officials still pointed to cash on hand, material inventories, secured credit, and audited, bonded deposits as evidence that the work had not outrun institutional control.

The pressure point was not whether the mountain could be drilled and blasted. It was whether the tunnel’s full two-bore vision—rail plus water—would be carried to completion on the financial terms the commission had established. The long-pending lease of the Moffat Tunnel to the reorganized Moffat Road, executed in this period, was framed as the final financial step preceding reorganization of the railroad system and as the mechanism by which taxpayers would be removed from direct exposure. Under the agreement, the Denver & Salt Lake Railway Company would lease the railroad portion of the tunnel for fifty years, with an option for renewal for an additional forty-nine years. Total rental under the contract would exceed $16,000,000 and was described as sufficient to retire and pay interest on approximately two-thirds of the outstanding tunnel bonds. For the first sixteen years the railroad would pay $345,900 annually. Beginning in 1943 the payment would increase to $563,740, after which it would decline gradually until, following 1972, the annual rental would be reduced to $12,000, or such amount as might be required to cover the cost of maintaining the Tunnel District organization.

The lease was not merely about rent checks. In addition to rental, the railroad assumed responsibility for maintenance estimated at approximately $75,000 annually, and it was required to carry $1,000,000 insurance on the tunnel timbering, keep the tunnel in repair, and insure inflammable portions for full value, barring acts of God. The rental payments were treated as an operating expense and given preference over mortgage bonds, with termination available in the event of default. If the tunnel was not completed by 1928, the railroad retained the right to finish the bore and credit the cost against rental obligations. The contract included provisions for overruns, requiring the railroad to assume responsibility for up to an additional $1,000,000 in bonds or assessments, including interest, if completion costs exceeded estimates. It also established competitive guardrails: the Tunnel Commission agreed not to rent the railroad bore to any other person or corporation for a period of less than ten years without the consent of the Moffat Road; if full capacity was not used, additional leases could be made, but not under terms more favorable than those granted to the Moffat Road, and the lease permitted the railroad to sublet the tunnel to other railroads.

The commission’s logic was blunt: railroad rental would bear two-thirds of total cost, leaving the remaining one-third to be recovered through water-bore rental, which, once secured on that basis, would remove the entire bonded debt of the Moffat Tunnel District—more than $9,000,000—from district taxpayers, with Denver the principal contributor. Contemporary reporting noted that executing the lease effectively blocked the Denver Water Board’s effort to secure a reduction in the rental set for use of the water bore. The commission declined a request to reopen hearings on bond valuation, pointing back to its December 23 resolution; under that finding, water-tunnel rental for the next sixteen years would amount to $172,950 annually. City officials protested that figure as excessive, suggesting informally that $110,000 to $135,000 might be more appropriate, but submitted no formal alternative proposal.

Operationally, the lease was sold as a turning point for the railroad itself. Reorganization officials expressed confidence that operation through the tunnel would stabilize finances by eliminating the costly twenty-six-mile mountain route over Rollins Pass, where upkeep and winter closures had contributed heavily to prior receivership. While tunnel rental was expected to be little cheaper than maintaining the old route, it would eliminate severe grades and winter interruptions, reducing maximum grades to approximately two percent. The new Denver & Salt Lake Railway company, incorporated in Delaware and qualified to do business in Colorado, was positioned to succeed the present Moffat Road once the technical steps of foreclosure were concluded, with final reorganization expected within several months.

And still, beneath all this paper confidence, one strategic uncertainty remained: no water user had yet committed to renting the water tunnel at the commission’s established rate. Officials acknowledged that without such a tenant, the final segment of the water bore might never be completed, potentially stopping at the last crosscuts necessary for economical construction of the railroad tunnel, and releasing $600,000 earmarked for cementing, which makes the water bore’s fate look less like engineering destiny and more like a demand-driven decision disguised as inevitability.

This same month shows Denver making sure it would not be boxed in on water. By mid-January 1926, Denver’s dispute with the Fraser Sources Irrigation & Power Company had ceased to be a contest over priority and had become a matter of execution. Following the Department of the Interior’s grant of independent ditch and tunnel rights, the outcome of the federal lawsuit no longer carried the power to alter Denver’s position, and contemporary reporting described the city’s remaining role as that of a “spectator.” The article characterized the maneuver as a “coup carefully planned,” emphasizing secrecy to prevent procedural interference. It also identified an engineering disconnect: Fraser’s original filings were based on a proposed tunnel alignment several miles from the Moffat Tunnel and at a different elevation; the Moffat bore “as now located” had not been contemplated when those claims were made. Denver’s approved ditch lines ran at a lower elevation, opening drainage acreage beyond the reach of the private system and eliminating functional overlap. Financial and administrative weaknesses further weakened Fraser’s posture, including failure to pay state corporate taxes, inability to demonstrate capacity to build, and a history of trying to sell its claimed rights to Denver, first at six figures and later for less. In this telling, Denver abandoned its push for immediate trial only once it was certain federal construction rights would be granted, and consent to continuance followed that assurance, not before it.

Across Colorado, January’s coverage kept looping back to symbolism, because the state’s Golden Jubilee coincided with repeated predictions that the Moffat Tunnel would be ‘holed through’ in 1926. Public confidence had matured into something both proud and exacting—support paired with an insistence on accountability and delivery. The tunnel was discussed as “just a question of time and money,” which reads as optimism until it is set beside the East Portal canvas bulkhead failure and the two bodies brought out at dawn.

Life at the portals was becoming civic as well as industrial. The East Portal Club was admitted into the Colorado Federation of Women’s Clubs as part of the state federation, and Mrs. Burgis Coy, the state chairman of literature, spoke at meetings about life at East Portal. That kind of organized, public-facing activity signals a camp trying to define itself as a place with routines, voices, and belonging, even while its daily purpose remained the same: feeding men and machinery into the mountain.

With “holing through” approaching, boosters began to plan how to turn breakthrough into a national stage. On January 27, 1926, coverage reported: “President Calvin Coolidge will press the button which starts the drill which will ‘hole through’ the Rocky Mountains in the Moffat tunnel next June [1926] if the plans of local and Denver men succeed.” The movement aimed to make the ceremony a national occasion, with news services and film companies carrying the story widely, and while some argued for postponing ceremonies until the first train ran through—estimated to be January 1927—the prevailing view favored midsummer, when the region could extract the greatest advertising value.

At the same time, writers revived an older reminder, “Although the tunnel has long been discussed as a railroad undertaking, it is worth recalling that its usefulness was never confined to rails alone. Five years ago the Boulder Daily Camera gave exclusive attention to the prospect of automobiles being carried through the bore on flat cars…” The point was not novelty, but authority and breadth: the law establishing the Moffat Tunnel Improvement District envisioned a transportation passage of broad public service, capable not only of accommodating trains but of carrying automobiles and other vehicles as conditions and operators might allow, with the western slope brought measurably nearer to Denver.

The project’s scale shows up in the work’s own arithmetic: thirteen pounds of powder to break a yard of ground, and two thousand, five hundred drills used daily. By early 1926, explosives were so central to modern infrastructure that the Bureau of Mines committed them to film in an educational motion picture, The Story of Dynamite, which included the Moffat Tunnel. Produced in cooperation with a major explosives manufacturer, it traced dynamite from raw material to finished cartridge, emphasizing precision, controlled heat, and methods intended to reduce accidental explosion. In its tunnel scenes, it showed gelatin dynamite in the driving of the Moffat Tunnel beneath the Divide, with safety sequences that demonstrated testing explosive strength with a ballistic pendulum and controlled detonations within steel galleries to assess dangers posed by gas or coal dust in mine atmospheres. Copies were made available without charge to schools, churches, civic organizations, and clubs through the Bureau of Mines, reflecting a belief that the public ought to understand not only dynamite’s power, but the disciplined methods required to use it. (For the segment showcasing the Moffat Tunnel in this film, see below or click here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zMKZY7jCZH0).

January also carried a quieter export of Colorado experience. Percy L. Hamilton, a native of Moffat County born at his parents’ ranch near Craig—then part of Routt County—came to Golden in 1916 to attend the Colorado School of Mines, was initiated into Sigma Alpha Epsilon, left to join the U.S. Army during World War I, returned after the Armistice, then departed at the close of his junior year to enter professional work. He arrived at the West Portal shortly after construction commenced and remained from the earliest phases, including the initial surveys, rising rapidly through the ranks under Chief Engineer R. H. Keays from a mucker to become assistant superintendent for more than two years. Accounts emphasized his unusual ability to manage men and his willingness to share in the most dangerous work, with the repeated point that he never sent workers into hazardous ground conditions without being prepared to lead the way himself, a trait that earned esteem across lines of authority. By late 1925 or early 1926, Ulen & Company of New York secured a $25,000,000 contract to build a modern municipal waterworks system for Athens, Greece, expected to take about ten years; Keays was selected as chief engineer, and Hamilton was chosen as superintendent of construction. He accepted and was scheduled to sail from New York on January 16 under a reported five-year contract, working directly under Keays. His departure prompted a workforce tribute: a watch valued at $350, described in one account as diamond-studded, presented as a token of friendship and esteem, with writers noting that among roughly 450 men at West Portal, his promotion was greeted with pride tempered by regret, and that he was trusted by “the bosses and the men,” with the saying that “every man swears by Ham.” Before leaving overseas he visited his parents, Mr. and Mrs. Thomas Hamilton, pioneers of Moffat County, and stopped to see friends in Golden. His position at West Portal was filled by Thomas Williams, a Colorado mining engineer, preserving continuity as the drive continued. In time, that promotion would place Williams dangerously close to the risks the tunnel demanded.

Taken as a whole, January 1926 is coherent precisely because it refuses to separate the tunnel into tidy categories. A failed canvas bulkhead kills two men and nearly takes a third, while a doctor’s oxygen gamble becomes a retrospective “milestone” and a newspaper headline tries to reassure the public before the bodies are even fully accounted for. The project’s progress is translated into feet remaining, gallons per minute, timbered bad ground, and cubic-yard costs, while the financing is translated into rent schedules, insurance mandates, maintenance obligations, foreclosure mechanics, and an attempt to shift debt from taxpayers to users. Denver’s water strategy changes venue and posture, turning litigation into after-noise once federal authorization is secured. Civic life expands into the camps. A national celebration is planned, down to the imagined presidential button. The tunnel’s purpose is reasserted as broader than rail alone. Dynamite is harnessed, measured, tested, and distributed on film as public instruction. A West Portal leader takes Colorado’s hard-earned experience to Greece. Through it all, the month’s underlying logic stays the same: the closer the tunnel comes to completion, the less tolerance it has for anything going wrong, because every failure—mechanical, financial, political, or human—lands against a finish line that people are already treating as inevitable.

This photograph shows the blowers positioned roughly 3,500 feet into the mountain, and the geological conditions suggest that the location is East Portal, where the rock was particularly hard. From Hitchcock & Tinkler’s records: “Two Root, No. 5½ (18 in. x 36 in.), Style D, High Pressure Heavy Duty blowers at each end. These two blowers set up tandem in Water Tunnel, although the use of two at the same time is seldom required. Each is operated by a 100 H. P., 870 R. P. M., 3 phase, 60 cycle, 2,200-volt motor. Each blower has displacement of 16 cubic feet per revolution and when operating at 300 R. P. M. will deliver 4,320 cubic feet of air per minute against 4 pounds pressure, and designed to operate at any pressure up to 4½ pounds.

“The blowers are located back of a cross cut and a mine door erected just ahead, and are moved up as necessary, 12-inch ventilation pipe being used for discharge into headings. In addition, two fans, delivering 12,000 cubic feet of air at ½ ounce pressure are installed at blower stations. All ventilation pipe being furnished by The Thompson Manufacturing Co. of Denver, Colo.

“All cross cuts back of the blower station are bulkheaded. The low pressure fans discharge directly into the Water Tunnel at the mine door, and this induces an air current through the open cross cut and outward through the Railroad Tunnel.

“The air, as it moves rearward, swells the volume of the outward bound current, primarily caused by the fans, the Water Tunnel thus acting as an intake while the Railroad Tunnel functions as an exhaust for the ventilating system.

“This system of blowing, no exhaust being used, and first suggested by Mr. D. W. Brunton, Consulting Engineer, has proven a success in every way. After blasting in the headings the high pressure air is also used to quickly clear the headings and work is generally resumed after blasting in from 20 to 30 minutes.

“As the gases and smoke travel out and get into the larger Railroad Tunnel, it becomes diffused and diluted with the pure air, and becomes unobjectionable, especially as it passes a given point in a few minutes.

“The use of the high pressure air after shooting not only hastens the expulsion of the smoke and gases, but also cools the atmosphere for the workmen. The temperature of the Water Tunnel 3½ miles from portal being about 65 degrees, and when electric mucking machine is operating this temperature is increased about 10% due to heat generated by the motor.”

B. Travis Wright, MPS | Preserve Rollins Pass | January 1, 2026

Want to uncover more incredible Moffat Tunnel stories? Our blog is filled with deeper dives into its history, untold tales, and connections to Rollins Pass. Explore more and journey through time with us!

The primary purpose of our work is to inform the public.

• Facebook
• Mail
• Twitter
• Amazon
• Goodreads
• YouTube
• LinkedIn

Heavy snow and deeper uncertainty made December 1925 the month when West Portal realized danger didn’t always come from the mountain.

Moffat Tunnel Construction Happenings from 100 Years Ago

December 1925 unfolded with a mix of anticipation and restraint, as if the year itself were holding its breath while Colorado looked toward the approaching breakthrough. Newspapers across the northwest interpreted the tunnel not simply as a piece of engineering work but as the instrument that would finally unlock the region’s potential. The Craig Empire captured this hope in its December 30th issue, insisting that “all Northwestern Colorado ever needed was transportation… with the building of the Western railroad and completion of the Moffat Tunnel, it will have transportation. Its farms will be reclaimed, its mines and oil fields opened, new enterprises of all kinds started, for transportation will open it to the markets of the world.” Communities were beginning to treat the tunnel’s impending completion as a turning point that would reorganize regional economics the moment trains could pass through the Continental Divide.

Yet the month’s actual progress figures did not match the scale of those expectations. East Portal entered the final days of December under heavy water flow—about 150 gallons per minute pouring into the pilot and railroad headings—requiring four pumps to operate around the clock. The water came from seams in the rock, but despite the volume, crews noted one saving grace: no timbering had been needed. The relative stability fit a broader truth about the east side of James Peak. There were fewer surface depressions, more pitch to the mountain, and fast snowmelt runoff, meaning fewer pockets where water could accumulate and percolate downward.

The west side behaved in the opposite manner. Engineers explained that every time the heading passed beneath a swamp or stream, soft ground followed. With more and deeper surface depressions, the West Portal became a collector of moisture, forcing the tunnel to contend with poor rock in zone after zone. Recent trouble was attributed by some to seepage from Fawn Creek, which may have been feeding downward along the slope. The last major obstacle still lay ahead: a branch of Ranch Creek—lying east of the Fawn Creek zone along the line of advance yet still part of the same west-side hydrologic regime—half a mile forward and 1,500 feet above the bore. The difficulty was serious enough that the contractors—Hitchcock and Tinkler—along with General Manager Lewis and Superintendent Kauffman, spent nearly all their time in the headings during December, guiding crews through what papers simply described as “treacherous ground.”

As the year closed, one newspaper offered a year-end snapshot of progress: the water tunnel stood at 14,220 feet from the east and 10,980 from the west, a total of 25,200 feet, reported as “seventy-eight percent completed”; the main headings were 14,200 feet east and 10,950 west, a total of roughly 25,150 feet, listed as “seventy-seven and nine-tenths percent completed”; and the railroad tunnel measured 11,600 feet east and 4,680 west, a combined 16,280 feet, said to be “fifty-one percent completed.”

While the numbers stalled, life around the portals continued in rhythms shaped by the season. Men left the camps in the days leading up to Christmas, thinning both portals as workers sought a brief return to their families. Some stories reflected the long arc of labor: Frank Beck, who had suffered a broken leg months earlier at the tunnel, had spent several months recuperating at home in Steamboat Springs. He returned to West Portal in early December, then left again to spend Christmas with his family before going straight back to work the following Sunday. Others captured the quieter continuity of community: on Christmas morning, Ernest Eugene Leist was born to Mr. and Mrs. William Leist, his father employed at East Portal; and on December 23, a marriage license was issued to Lawrence Pastorius and Marie Chidester, both of West Portal (they later divorced in 1938). Federal attention to the tunnel towns continued as well. In Christmas week, the U.S. Senate confirmed Vernet A. Kauffman to a four-year term as postmaster of West Portal, signaling that the settlement, however temporary it might appear on maps, mattered enough to receive formal civic appointments.

Not every December headline tied to the tunnel community was hopeful. In Denver, twelve-year-old Earl Frink was killed when a small tunnel in the backyard of the Tuckaway home at 1147 West Mississippi Avenue in Denver collapsed. Earl’s father worked at East Portal. Although the boy’s death was unrelated to the Moffat Tunnel project, the story landed with a particular ache because the circumstances suggest he may have been attempting to imitate the kind of work he saw shaping his father’s daily life—a tragic echo of the larger excavation unfolding under James Peak.

The month also brought movement on the political and economic architecture that would govern the tunnel once completed. The Moffat Tunnel Commission fixed rental values at two-thirds of the project’s total cost for the railroad tunnel and one-third for the water tunnel. The Denver & Salt Lake Railroad was the only applicant, though exclusivity was forbidden by law, guaranteeing eventual access to any other road that sought rights. At the same time, Denver continued its fight to control the water bore, armed with an Interior Department ruling that declared it more important to provide Denver with an adequate supply than to furnish water to the Fraser Sources Irrigation and Power Company. The ruling sharpened the stakes surrounding the water tunnel precisely because Denver’s own water use was immense—averaging 55,830,000 gallons per day in 1925, with a peak of 100,850,000 gallons on August 2, 1924, spread across 781 miles of mains and nearly four thousand hydrants. The water tunnel was increasingly understood as a future lifeline for a city already straining its existing system.

Gerald Hughes told the Denver Real Estate Exchange that the railroad would be fully reorganized and ready to run trains through the tunnel on the very first day the bore was completed. That confidence, however, glossed over the substantial operational, financial, and physical hurdles that still stood between aspiration and reality; the statement revealed more about the desire to project readiness than about the project’s actual condition.

It was in the midst of this combination of progress, pressure, and early-winter storms that West Portal—normally a predictable, work-worn settlement—was jolted by a crime so sudden and intimate that it briefly overshadowed the tunnel’s advance.

---

On a cold winter night in late December 1925, in a settlement carved out of snowdrifts and railroad ambitions, Fred Sperandio opened his back-room door to someone he seemed to know. A flicker of matchlight flashed against the cold timber. A single shot cracked through the dark. And by sunrise, the quiet community of West Portal—perched at the western mouth of the not-yet-completed Moffat Tunnel—had become the epicenter of a killing that baffled investigators, stirred fears among tunnel workers, and left a lasting mystery in the high country.

Newspaper accounts from Denver, Leadville, Fraser, and Colorado Springs scrambled to tell the story of the Italian immigrant who managed the recreation hall at West Portal and was struck down in the very room he lived in. Their coverage, uneven but earnest, paints a portrait of a man whose life was equal parts courage and conflict, and a crime scene that raised more questions than the bloodhounds, posses, or railroad guards could answer.

A LIFE LIVED IN THE HIGH COUNTRY

Fred Sperandio’s story begins far from Colorado. Born in Tyrol, Italy in 1887, he grew up “in the shadow of the Alps,” served in the Austrian army, and emigrated to the United States with his brother James in 1911. He worked mines in Trinidad, then Leadville, managing the Big Four mine with A. Seppi before moving to West Portal in 1921. There, he purchased a half interest in the recreation hall, a soft-drink and pool establishment that doubled as a social hub for tunnel workers.

Friends remembered him as adventurous, bold, faithful to those he trusted—yet also “reckless,” competitive, and adept enough at gambling to make money at it. Some said he was well liked and had no enemies. Others insisted he had collected a few. Both views were true. Sperandio could be generous and warm, but his fearlessness, his success at cards, and his habit of keeping cash on hand created undercurrents that did not always surface in polite company.

By December 1925, Sperandio lived in a small room at the back of the recreation hall, where he kept substantial sums from nightly receipts and private winnings hidden in secret caches. He knew the risks, but he had weathered worse in Europe’s mountains and Colorado’s mines. Confidence served him well—until the night it didn’t.

A KNOCK IN THE NIGHT

On Saturday, December 19th, Sperandio closed the hall near midnight and went to bed. Sometime after, a noise came from the alley door. Every version of the story agrees on the crucial detail: Sperandio rose, dressed at least enough to answer the door, struck a match to light his way, and opened the door to someone he recognized. Whether that visitor spoke to him or merely stepped forward is lost to history. What is not lost is the bullet, fired from a .45-caliber Colt automatic, that passed through his heart almost immediately. He died where he fell.

By morning, Edward Evans—the recreation hall’s day manager—arrived to open the place and found him on the floor. The room had been torn apart. Mattresses were slashed open. One showed signs of burning, as did parts of Sperandio’s clothing. The bed itself had been set alight. Someone had tried to burn the room or the body or both. The cash register had been emptied of roughly $125, but the real target had been the hidden money in Sperandio’s room, an amount somewhere between $1,500 and $1,800*. It was gone. (*In 2025 dollars, that amount translates to approximately $28,000–$33,000.)

CONFLICTING CLUES AND EARLY THEORIES

Grand County Sheriff Mark E. Fletcher and Deputy Sheriff James Quinn arrived from Hot Sulphur Springs, but the facts refused to resolve cleanly. Early reports floated the idea of two killers—one who hid inside the hall before closing and another who waited outside the sleeping quarters. Within forty-eight hours, however, Fletcher stated flatly that he now believed one man committed the murder, and that “clues unearthed” supported the theory that the killer was an acquaintance of Sperandio.

The sheriff’s reconstructed version of events—echoed by multiple Denver papers—held that Sperandio had been awakened by a noise at the rear door, had gotten up and dressed, and had stepped forward with a match in hand when the concealed robber fired. This version better matched the tight confines of the room, the single point of entry, and the precise shot. More importantly, it aligned with the inference that Sperandio would only open that door after midnight for someone he trusted.

The conflicting press portrayals of Fred’s personal life now took on new meaning. Some newspapers quoted locals saying he had “no enemies.” Others, relying on Leadville sources who had known him for years, admitted he had made a few. When weighed against the intimate nature of the killing and the deliberate effort to destroy evidence afterward, the latter assessment seems more convincing. The murderer did not stumble onto opportunity; he acted with knowledge—of Sperandio, of his routines, and of his hidden money.

SNOWBOUND MOUNTAINS AND A RACE AGAINST DISAPPEARING TRACKS

Snow had buried West Portal that week. Every report emphasizes the same reality: all roads were impassable, blanketed by gigantic drifts. Fletcher declared that escape by road was impossible, and he deployed men to watch the mountain passes in case the killer attempted to flee on snowshoes. The only viable escape route was the railroad.

Trains on the Moffat Road were carefully guarded. Passenger lists were checked. In one striking detail from a Denver story, officers discovered that a man who had boarded at West Portal was missing when the train reached Denver. No follow-up ever clarified who he was.

Recognizing the urgency, Fletcher summoned bloodhounds from the Quillen kennels in Colorado Springs. Their arrival on December 22nd produced the most tantalizing, if inconclusive, movement in the case. Released at the scene, the dogs ran directly toward the railroad, circling the depot and moaning when they lost the scent. Another paper reported that the dogs followed a trail from West Portal to Fraser, five miles away, before similarly losing it near the tracks.

Whether the dogs followed the same trail or different ones is impossible to know from surviving accounts. What is clear is that their work reinforced the sheriff’s belief that the killer moved toward the railroad—with or without boarding a train—and that his trace dissolved at or near the rail line.

Meanwhile, Sperandio’s brothers James and Charles arrived to assist. James returned to Denver with the body that evening; Charles remained to help the sheriff for several days.

A CRIME WITHOUT AN ENDING

By December 23rd, Fletcher stated publicly that an arrest was “entirely probable within the next few days.” Yet by the time the long obituary was printed in Leadville, no suspect had been named, no arrest had occurred, and no clear trail remained.

What survived was a portrait of a man whose life had been shaped by mountains in two portions of the globe; whose courage, charm, and intensity had won him both friends and enemies; and whose final moments were marked by trust, surprise, and violence.

It also left behind a mystery: whether his killer fled over snow, vanished onto a train, or simply blended back into the ranks of workers, gamblers, and itinerants who passed through West Portal that winter.

The newspapers closed the matter with a line as stark as tracks vanishing into blowing snow: “No trace of the murderer has been found.”

A century later, that remains the last official word.

Fred was unmarried and a member of the American Federation of Human Rights, an international co-Masonic lodge. He is buried in Evergreen Cemetery in Leadville, Colorado, in the IOOF section, a calm resting place that offers a measure of closure the investigation never found. His death appears on our list of Moffat Tunnel-era fatalities because it occurred within the West Portal settlement and arose directly from the conditions and community created by the tunnel project itself.

---

Set side by side, the two December narratives, the crews driving steadily through rock and water and the midnight violence that caught West Portal off guard, revealed a deeper truth about life at the portals in the winter of 1925. Men pushed toward breakthrough under the Divide, pumps fought the constant inflow, and Colorado’s optimism climbed with every foot gained, yet the same camp that kept the project alive carried risks that had nothing to do with geology. December 1925 was not simply another month of headings advanced; it underscored that the Moffat Tunnel was shaped by people who lived close to danger in all its forms. Workers, immigrants, gamblers, and wanderers shared a narrow world carved out of snow and timber, a world where the ground could shift in an instant, and in the shadow of James Peak the communities built to support a great ambition proved as unpredictable as the mountain itself. So the month closed with a peculiar duality. On paper, progress slowed to a crawl, held back by wet rock and the peculiar geology of the mountain, while in the public imagination the tunnel loomed larger than ever, an unfinished promise expected to reorganize markets, revive farms, open mines and oil fields, and bind Northwestern Colorado to the outside world in a way the region had waited on for decades. And as the year ended with only modest gains, the quiet that settled over the portals carried an unmistakable sense that the work waiting in 1926 would be anything but easy.

Image Caption #1: Fred Sperandio rests in Leadville’s Evergreen Cemetery, far from the snowbound doorway at West Portal where a single shot through the heart ended his life. The match he struck faded in seconds; the mystery of his 1925 murder has stayed cold for a century.

Image Caption #2: Published in newspapers in December 1925, this photograph survives today as an original print held by Preserve Rollins Pass from the Moffat Tunnel Commission archive. Of particular interest, the box positioned to the right of the mine cart tracks bears the label “POWDER.”

B. Travis Wright, MPS | Preserve Rollins Pass | December 9, 2025

Want to uncover more incredible Moffat Tunnel stories? Our blog is filled with deeper dives into its history, untold tales, and connections to Rollins Pass. Explore more and journey through time with us!

The primary purpose of our work is to inform the public.

• Facebook
• Mail
• Twitter
• Amazon
• Goodreads
• YouTube
• LinkedIn

Three-quarters complete and pressing westward, November 1925 forced crews to contend with the softest and most unpredictable ground encountered to date.

Moffat Tunnel Construction Happenings from 100 Years Ago

By November 1925, the Moffat Tunnel stood roughly three-quarters complete, with the main headings of both bores driven more than 23,000 feet beneath the Continental Divide. By late November, more than fourteen thousand feet of the railroad bore had been opened to its full 16-by-24-foot dimensions, representing roughly forty-six percent of the total length. On paper, progress looked steady; underground, the mountain had changed temperament. Ten thousand three hundred feet from the West Portal, crews struck the softest ground yet—a gray, water-laden material that behaved like newly mixed cement. Ordinary timbering bowed and splintered under the pressure, and progress slowed “almost to a crawl,” one engineer admitted, as workers resorted to dense breast-boarding and double sets of timber to hold back the mountain. Tunneling crews of the era often used food metaphors for soft, running ground; in 1925, the material under West Portal behaved with a heaviness and flow that a modern reader might picture as a kind of gravy.

At East Portal, 13,500 feet in, they faced a different obstacle: a heavy flow of sixty to eighty gallons a minute from fissures in a hard-rock seam, delaying progress by several feet a day. As the grade crested at the apex and began sloping down toward the western crews, gravity drainage would cease, and pumps might soon be needed to lift water back toward the apex so it could escape out the east side. For a time that November, the two ends of the tunnel labored under opposing forms of resistance—one collapsing, one flooding.

Even so, the pace of excavation impressed outside observers. The Moffat Tunnel Commission, led by W. P. Robinson, reported that 14,680 feet of the full-size railroad bore were complete—10,672 feet on the east, 4,213 on the west—and that crosscuts between the twin bores were seventy-seven percent finished. In the smaller water tunnel, engineers ambitiously expected the two headings to meet by January 1, 1926, with the main railroad headings connecting by July 1, 1926—six months ahead of schedule. If that held, trains might pass under the Divide before the contractual deadline of July 19, 1927. Still, the Commission cautioned newspapers against premature optimism. “Progress on the Moffat Tunnel is very satisfactory,” the official statement read, “but some papers have been led into an error as to the probable time of completion.” The reminder was deliberate: “All this is predicated upon fairly good ground at the west portal, but this remains bad.”

The local press captured both the strain and the spirit of the work. The Rocky Mountain News reported that west-side crews had struck ‘rock disintegrated by water and pressure… of the same consistency as newly mixed concrete,’ with forces ‘exceeding the heavy rock pressures already passed in the bore’ and ‘sufficient to crush ordinary timbers to bits.’ Other reports the same week described the pressure as strong enough to ‘break ordinary timbering like match sticks,’ underscoring the severity of the ground conditions at West Portal. Engineers added that progress had slowed “almost to a crawl,” as pressures in this zone surpassed those encountered “from the portal to the breasts of the bore,” requiring extra timbering beyond what ordinarily held the ground. In contrast, the Steamboat Sentinel and Herald Democrat focused on the eastern crews who had passed the tunnel’s high point and begun working downgrade toward the west—an engineering milestone that meant every new foot brought the two sides measurably closer. For the first time, both portal crews were advancing on the same side of the Continental Divide: the Divide had been crossed underground.

Thanksgiving brought a different kind of relief. At West Portal, two hundred fifty men and visitors crowded into the camp hall for an “athletic smoker”—a boxing event that pitted the tunnel’s two sides against each other in sport rather than in production. West Portal won two decisions, two draws, and a knockout; East Portal earned two draws of its own. The following week, newspaper columns filled with small human notes: R. J. (or Guy J.) Tanner, a veteran drill operator described as “one of the best,” returned to Boulder to spend the holiday with his parents. Roy Gordon traveled from the tunnel to Greeley to be with family. In Denver, a short notice recorded that Frank Beck appeared before the State Industrial Commission to seek compensation for the loss of his foot in a cave-in the previous December at West Portal. There were also marriages—Clarence Quick of East Portal to Ethel Knowles of Hutchinson, Kansas, and Arthur Brown of East Portal to Mildred Smith of Denver. In these glimpses from scattered papers, one sees the rhythm of a community living within an industrial epic: weddings, injuries, homecomings, and prizefights conducted under a mountain that still threatened to collapse.

Late in the month, the Commission turned from ground pressure to paperwork. On November 26, filings were made with the U.S. General Land Office for the formal railroad rights-of-way at both portals—1.77 miles at the west and 0.21 mile at the east. The request required the approval of Secretary of the Interior Hubert Work. Attorney Erskine Myer explained that the filings merely extended existing rights-of-way across federal land in the Arapaho and Colorado National Forests and did not affect private property already deeded to the Commission. The U.S. Forest Service had granted permission to clear timber along the corridors. Such quiet administrative steps rarely made headlines, yet they would determine how trains would legally reach both portals when the bore was finished.

By the close of November 1925, the figures told a story of both triumph and tension: 23,500 feet driven in the main headings, 14,000 feet enlarged to full size, and the Divide’s internal high point crossed from east to west. The crews were entering their third winter under the mountain, now armed with experience as well as ambition. The public saw a clean statistic—seventy-five percent complete—but the men underground saw something different: timbers bending, drills stalling, the hiss of water in darkness, and the small warmth of Thanksgiving light at the portal.

If October had been a month of acceleration, November was one of reckoning. The mountain had revealed its softest core just as the tunnel neared its hardest test. Each foot gained that month demanded new invention, new caution, and new faith that the opposite heading was still on line. The work continued, measured not only in feet of progress but in proof that endurance, not optimism, would carry Colorado through the last quarter of the Divide.

Image Caption #1: With the surrounding ground exerting pressure “sufficient to break ordinary timbering like match sticks,” workers in the pioneer bore labored under conditions that could change without warning.

Image Caption #2: Requiring extra timbering beyond what ordinarily held the ground, this section shows how progress slowed to a crawl.

B. Travis Wright, MPS | Preserve Rollins Pass | November 25, 2025

Want to uncover more incredible Moffat Tunnel stories? Our blog is filled with deeper dives into its history, untold tales, and connections to Rollins Pass. Explore more and journey through time with us!

The primary purpose of our work is to inform the public.

• Facebook
• Mail
• Twitter
• Amazon
• Goodreads
• YouTube
• LinkedIn