Roseville Tunnel

[4] As a result, DL&W Assistant Chief Engineer Wheaton recommended that a tunnel be drilled instead, and President William Truesdale concurred.

Its successor, the Erie Lackawanna Railway (EL), shifted the remaining track in the tunnel several feet north in the 1970s in order to boost clearance for high-and-wide railroad cars.

Ten years later, NJ Transit began to rebuild the line as part of the Lackawanna Cut-Off Restoration Project.

Unless the Lackawanna was willing to close the line for a prolonged period, there was no way to safely scale back the tall, steep rockwalls through Colby Cut, the tunnel's western approach.

Instead, after the Armstrong Cut Slide, the DL&W paid a shantyman to watch for fallen rocks and clear ice at Roseville.

A hand-thrown switch had already been installed in 1913 to allow trains to shift tracks if one were blocked by fallen rocks, indicating that the railroad was acutely aware of the potential threat from almost the very beginning.

On April 13, 2022, the NJ Transit Board of Directors approved a $32.5 million contract to Schiavone Construction Company of Secaucus, New Jersey.

The eastern portal of Roseville Tunnel in 1989, five years after the tracks were removed from the Lackawanna Cut-Off. The hill above was partially blasted away in the aborted effort to create an open cut, not a tunnel.
Eastbound view of the interior of Roseville Tunnel, near the west portal, on April 21, 2011. A 100-foot (30 m) section of concrete lining, applied during the 1970s, failed to eliminate drainage problems.
A 1988 photo of a rockslide detector in Colby Cut just west of Roseville Tunnel. If a rock breaks through the screen, the trackside signals are automatically set to stop.