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
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