Back in 1940, Pennsylvania opened its first section of its turnpike: 2 lanes in each direction but only one lane each way through the tunnels.
Bad idea.
Fast forward a couple of decades. It’s time to widen the turnpike. And instead of blasting through more of the mountain, the engineers decided to reroute the turnpike a bit to the south and go over the mountain.
And that’s how we ended up with 13 miles of abandoned roadway and three abandoned tunnels.
Could there be a more unusual destination for a bike ride?
Just getting there was an adventure. One day it will just mean getting to the Sideling Hill rest stop on the Pennsylvania Turnpike because the Turnpike Authority is building a trailhead there.
But for now, we relied on tips from Facebook. Thank you to the man who suggested the unmarked dirt parking lot about 0.8 miles down from the old Civilian Conservation Corps site on Oregon Road in Waterfall. A 15-second walk to asphalt!
The surface was in decent shape for being 80 years old, though sometimes we had to change lanes.
We headed east to the Sideling Tunnel,a bit closer than the tunnel closer to Breezewood, plus we heard that one was more likely to have glass. True? Don’t know, but we made it through our tunnel, through what we think must have once been a rest area and to the end without a flat tire. Same for the way back and a bit further.
The tunnel is damp but there’s only one spot where water really dripped down.
Distance in the dark is 6,782 feet, or just over 1.25 miles.
Here’s some of what we saw in and around the tunnel:
The CCC site has an interesting story. It operated from 1933 to 1937, at the height of the Great Depression. Then it became a site for some of the 12,000 people who objected to World War II on religious grounds, from Oct. 1, 1941 — before Pearl Harbor! — to the summer of 1944. About 15% of those conscientious objectors were from Pennsylvania.
And then it became a camp for German prisoners of war. It opened in May 1945, so just as the war ended, and continued to March 1946.
Exploring by bicycle 
It was actually a good idea, originally. Using the abandoned tunnels from a never-finished railroad allowed them to build the original turnpike quicker and more cheaply. It was likely that motor traffic increased far more quickly than anticipated, leading to the bottlenecks at the tunnels.
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