Press Release

Moffat Tunnel Radically Modernizes Travel West Through the Rockies

Denver - Eighty-seven years ago this week, David Moffat, the visionary railroad magnate, pioneered connecting eastern Colorado with western destinations.  Before this date in 1928, trains travelling west through the Rockies were often stalled for months in the winter, as railroad workers cleared the tracks of heavy snow.

With high costs associated to clear snow from the tracks at Rollins Pass, which connects Gilpin and Grand Counties, David Moffat, with his Denver, Northwestern and Pacific Railroad Company, was nearly bankrupted.  Nevertheless he proposed a solution to build a tunnel for train tracks through the Rocky Mountains. 

 Many scoffed at the grandiose idea, but Colorado voters approved the plan in 1922, and the work began. Six years later, after 28 workers died completing the project, the steel-and-concrete Moffat Tunnel opened on February 28, 1928. The train trip through the mountains could now be made in 12 minutes instead of the previous ride, which was five hours long….in fair weather!

In 1936, eight years after the tunnel opened, the Denver Water Board began to bring water from the Williams Fork and Fraser Rivers on Colorado’s Western Slope, to Denver using a tunnel built alongside the railroad tunnel. Of course, since then, many new ways have been created to bring water to the Queen City of the Plains. But the Moffat Tunnel did it first.

Moffat died in March of 1911, well-before his vision was realized.

 

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FOR MORE INFORMATION:
Deborah Radman
deborah.radman@state.co.us
303-866-3670 (direct)