Long the subject of community speculation and trespassing incidents at its eastern portal, the tunnel is owned by the C&O's successor entity, CSX Transportation.

The tunnel, which is still considered dangerous, was featured in a 1998 newspaper article by Richmond Times-Dispatch reporter Mark Holmberg and photographer P. Kevin Morley, who explored portions from the eastern portal with professional caving personnel and equipment.

Unlike the bedrock through which the C&O carved its western tunnels, Richmond's blue marl clay shrink-swell soil tended to change with rainfall and groundwater, causing deadly cave-ins during the construction.

To utilize the new "water level" line to ship coal to Newport News, and to avoid the troublesome tunnel as an added benefit, the C&O constructed a 3-mile-long (4.8 km) double-track elevated viaduct along the riverfront extending between the area of Hollywood Cemetery east past downtown Richmond, the Shockoe Valley, and Church Hill to join the Peninsula Subdivision at what became Fulton Yard east of the tunnel.

With a connection just south of the new Main Street Station, it was now possible for traffic to come off the old Virginia Central and enter the Peninsula Subdivision without using the Church Hill Tunnel.

[4] On October 2, while repairs were under way, a work train was trapped by a collapse of 150 feet (45.72 m) of the tunnel near the western end, below Jefferson Park (close to the intersection of N. 18th Street and E.

At that time there were no homes in the area, as most buildings were around 25th and Broad near Nolde Brothers Bakery[7] where the tunnel crossed the middle of Church Hill.

[8] Approximately 200 workmen crawled under flat cars and then escaped out the eastern end of the tunnel, including the fireman Benjamin F. Mosby (who died hours later at Grace Hospital because of burns caused by the ruptured boiler), but the engineer Thomas Joseph Mason was killed; initial reports claimed that, besides Mason, six black laborers were unaccounted for,[6][9] although the missing number of men was later scaled down to two, identified as day laborers Richard Lewis and “H.

[10][11] During the next week, the community anxiously watched rescue efforts, but each time progress was made, further cave-ins occurred; only the body of Mason was recovered, on October 10.