Moffat Rail Tunnel West Portal, Colorado

The west portal of the Moffat Rail Tunnel is at Winter Park, a ski resort, developed by the city of Denver, and the largest municipal ski development in the nation. It opened in 1939, with its first ski lift, built by the WPA, and grew quickly into a major ski resort, owned by Denver’s parks department until the city sold it to a private company in 2002. A weekend “ski train,” which started in 1940, still connects the slopes to downtown Denver, 65 miles away by train. Work on the Moffat Tunnel started in 1924, and it took four years to drill and blast the 24-foot high, 18-foot wide hole, 6.2 miles though the mountains, and under the Continental Divide. It is actively used for freight trains by Union Pacific, and is the fourth longest mainline railway tunnel in the USA.