Moonville Tunnel, Brown Township, Vinton County, Ohio, USAi

Regional Level Types
Moonville Tunnel	- not defined -
Brown Township	Township
Vinton County	County
Ohio	State
USA	Country

The Moonville Tunnel is a historic brick railroad tunnel along the former mainline of the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad, which later became part of the Chessie System in 1972, and finally CSX Transportation in 1986. The Moonville Tunnel was built in the mid-1850s for the Marietta and Cincinnati Railroad which was merged into the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad system in 1887 (DePeel, 1993, Coleman, 2001). The tunnel is located in Brown Township, Vinton County, about 9.5 miles northeast of McArthur. This locality was not included in either edition of Ernest Carlson’s, Minerals of Ohio book.

Moonville was a mining village that hosted a population of less than one hundred people. The town started declining in 1910 as coal mines began closing and the last family left in 1947. Traffic on the mainline of the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad increased over time even though the village was slowly becoming abandoned.

The Moonville Tunnel is the subject of numerous ghost stories and urban legends, including one of a "ghost engineer" that would wave a lantern at the end of the tunnel causing engineers of trains to go into emergency stop. In 1981, a signal was erected so that railroad workers had to use the signal to stop a train, not a lantern and engineers could not go into an emergency stop unless the signal was red (Depeel, 1993). Four years later, CSX Transportation decided to downgrade its line from Cumberland, West Virginia to Cincinnati, Ohio which included this stretch. Two years later after this decision, CSX decided to further abandon the line from Belpre, Ohio in Washington County to Dundas in Vinton County (DePeel, 1993, Coleman, 2001). The rails were removed shortly thereafter, but CSX opted not to blast the tunnel.

The Moonville Tunnel was visited Charlene McGue as part of her master’s thesis on sulphate and carbonate efflorescences in Vinton County (1982). A sample was collected from the Moonville Tunnel’s wall, then stored in a plastic bag to protect it from changes in humidity. The sample was then analyzed by X-ray diffraction and was identified as gypsum. McGue postulated that the gypsum was formed from the weathering of pyrite and marcasite in a coal seam directly above the tunnel (the Middle Kittaning #6 Coal Seam in the Pennsylvanian Allegheny and Conemaugh Formations), by groundwater. The water was then transported with a solution rich in calcium sulfate and gypsum crystallized between the cracks of the tunnel’s brickwork (McGue, 1982).

The Moonville Tunnel today is part of the Moonville Rail Trail and can be accessed by foot.

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