Mary E. LyonsThe Blue Ridge Tunnel: A Remarkable Engineering Feat in Antebellum Virginia (Transportation)

This book reviews many aspects of the building of what at the time was the longest tunnel in the world. There are several redundancies in the book and it ends with the completion of the tunnel and does not cover many of the interesting elements of it's history in the last 1/2 century, but this is an excellent story of the building of the tunnel and the people involved.

This book is the essential companion to the biography of Claudius Crozet. Magnificent social history. If the two authors could collaborate on a synthesis of Lyons work and the ten years of Crozet's life building the tunnel, that would make one complete, complex history.

This is an great read. We hiked the tunnel in May of 2021 and we wanted to read the book and know the history!

Great book. Well written and researched.

Great book for everyone that likes history of the b&o railroad

This is an amazing story that sheds a better understanding of the American push to move west that is not taught in our history books, nor in the cowboy/Indian/Conestoga wagon films.Mary Lyons has thoroughly researched the amazing role of the Irish immigrants (and southern slaves) in digging the train tunnels through the bedrock of mountain chains that opened the pathways to the west. Any student of Virginia history and any person of Irish heritage should appreciate this amazing account.

This book is far more a study in genealogy and cultural anthropology than an engineering analysis of the tunnel itself. Who CARES what kind of curtains the laborers hung in their shacks?

Poorly written, nearly all of this book is citations from other's works. Most images stock items, some of them are cited as " like " what it " may" have been like or looked like. I read every word yet learned nothing beyond that which I had heard in history class 35+ years ago.