It is 4 am and I am lying in bed thinking about getting up to brew coffee and start my day, when I hear that familiar sound approaching. I can feel the thunder of the mighty Norfolk Southern engines all the way from the third floor of my house on Gay Street. I lie still and listen, as if waiting for a friend, for the low wale of the horn echoing off the hills and the river as the train approaches Black Rock Tunnel. How does a train horn in the dark manage to sound both mournful and comforting? Is it just me? Like a distant Final Trumpet from the other realm calling to us, or perhaps it just reminds us of our childhood and all that has been lost and found. Whatever it is, I like it; it is a timeless sound.
Black Rock Tunnel runs under the north side of Phoenixville and was opened in 1838. That is over 180 years of continual use for one of the oldest rail tunnels in America. It is almost 2000 feet long. I have walked through it on occasion over the years, (do not do that, it is illegal and there be dragons), and on a gloomy day it is a long dark walk. It was constructed by the famous Reading Railroad to provide passenger service from Reading to Philly but also to bring Pennsylvania’s noted anthracite coal down to the ports in Philadelphia and out to the world. It must have been a dramatic sight for a passenger heading north to exit the tunnel directly onto a trestle forty feet above a scenic stretch of the Schuylkill River.
Have you ever considered how significant our town and our tunnel are to the world? The line still goes to Reading and from there to Allentown and everything east and north, or to Harrisburg and everything west, the rest of the country and Canada. All connected by our tunnel. Think of all the goods and people that have passed beneath our north side. It has been owned by Reading Railroad, then Penn Central, then Conrail, now Norfolk Southern. But it is ours. And it has seen everything. Coal to heat the homes and factories of New York and Boston in the 19th century, and to move the steam ships that traveled the world for war and commerce. During the world wars it was instrumental in shipping steel from Phoenixville. During WW2 it saw wounded troops being transported to Valley Forge General Hospital. (Now University of Valley Forge) How many faces have passed through it over the years? How many automobiles? How much textiles? How much fuel oil to heat our homes? How many Christmas presents? Pigs and cattle; tobacco and clothing; toys and tanks; food and furniture; all had to pass through Black Rock Tunnel.
Our tunnel was cut mainly by Irish immigrants, who also dug our canal. Ironic because the canal men rightly saw the tunnel as competition and tried various means of sabotage. But the Irish kept digging and today the tunnel is still used while the canal is essentially a museum. Several hundred Irishmen hand-drilled through solid rock at the rate of 30-40 feet per month. Can you imagine that? It was dirty, hard, dangerous work. They lived clustered down by the river but as the community grew, they spread up the hill and called it “tunnel hill”, which is still what we call our north side. At one point almost half of Phoenixville was Irish; is that why we have so many great pubs today? Ha.
We live in a world built by others. We think the infrastructure that has made modern life so effortless has always been there, but it hasn’t. Every day I walk through a land that was willed into existence by better men than me. I walk on sidewalks I did not pour, and I drive on roads and bridges I did not, and could not, construct. I have hot showers and I never thirst because years ago some men put a water main down the middle of my street, and I had nothing to do with it. As I get older, I am trying to be less cynical and more grateful. To be grateful and at peace with those who went before me. And to be of service to those who are coming behind me. To be grateful for the builders among us, from the diggers of canals to the one great carpenter who has spoken our world into being. We make much of politicians and celebrities, and little of tunnel drillers. I think we have it backwards.
It is too easy to be angry at the world today. To only see what is wrong, or what is missing. To miss all that has been prepared for us and dropped on our doorstep before we ever arrived here. To neglect all the unseen work being done by unseen hands all around us every day and every night. To ignore the ghosts of the Irish who tunneled through our hill like dwarves long before we were born; so that we could have; so that we could be. To forget to walk through our days with grateful hearts. To never know the quiet feeling that comes from the heavy sound of a train as it rumbles through a tunnel full of memory, in the still hours of the morning. Peace.
“When the whistle blew and the call stretched thin across the night, one had to believe that any journey could be sweet to the soul.”
Charles Tennyson Turner