вЂњEngineers just go crazy over it,вЂќ said Suzanne Gandy, a marketing strategist in the Whitesell Group, a Roanoke landscape architecture firm that is leading the restoration drive. His traces are scattered around central Virginia: a town, home to a famed pizza joint, bears his name a few miles west of Charlottesville the canal aqueducts and towpath he oversaw are still in use, carrying trains a prominent stone marks his grave beside VMIвЂ™s Preston Library and a campus building is named for him.Д«ut the most impressive memorial to the man is the tunnel, which tackled a barrier that had always slowed the way west. Thomas Jefferson considered him the top mathematician in America. As state engineer, he planned the route and designed bridges and aqueducts for the James River and Kanawha Canal, which in terms of time, money and calories may well rank as VirginiaвЂ™s greatest public works project. A uniform he devised is, with little modification, still worn by West Point and VMI cadets. He was a founder of the Virginia Military Institute (VMI) and the first president of its Board of Visitors. He designed a popular protractor and was among the first proponents of classroom blackboards - by some accounts, the first. Born in France, he worked for Napoleon, was a prisoner of the Russians and taught generals of both Union and Confederacy at West Point. That would be Claudius Crozet, a bona fide genius who lived the sort of big, brash life that one doesnвЂ™t often associate with civil engineering. The details are still as murky as the tunnelвЂ™s middle, where blind crayfish swim and the temperature is a cave-like 52 degrees, but the day may be coming when this 19th century marvel is well-known to modern adventurers.

It is difficult to find.Д«ut maybe not for much longer: After years of dreaming, planning and negotiation, the tunnel is the centerpiece of a planned hiking and biking trail that would traverse the Blue Ridge between Charlottesville and Waynesboro. Its western end is tucked into a shadowy notch swathed in fern and moss and mist. Its eastern portal is hidden behind black raspberry and shoulder-high weeds, and blocked by an icy pool of thigh-high water. The Blue Ridge Tunnel has lain abandoned for 61 years. Many men were buried around it.ДЄnd it was dug blind, its path figured on paper, a leap of faith in mathematics rare for the day - yet so fine was the calculation that when diggers from east and west вЂњholed through,вЂќ their tunnelвЂ™s alignment was just inches from perfect. Hundreds of feet of mountain pressed down upon it.

Its dark stone bears the scars of hand chisels and sledgehammers, and the black powder charges that blew both ends toward the middle.ДЄn engineering miracle, people called it: When trains first passed through it in April 1858, this was the longest railroad tunnel in the world. AFTON, VA (AP) It drills through the hard heart of Afton Mountain, four-fifths of a mile long, walls and ceiling hacked into a graceful, almost delicate arch.

Blue ridge tunnel trail