As some of ya'll know I went off to college in Richmond, Va a long, long time ago... One of the very first kids I met was a skinny kid with kinky red hair, who like me, carried a big sketchbook every where he went... Also like me, Richard Bland loved to poke around the old ruins and abandoned buildings in the the older parts of the city...

So Richard and I became sketchin' buddies and would try to outdo the other in finding strange places that would give most people the creeps but that were treasures to us and we'd spend hours sitting with our sketchbooks drawing various creepy treasures that we had found or folks had told us about...

One day, Richard took me for a long, long walk... Maybe 4 miles to the east end of Richmond... We walked right thru the tobacco factories and all the industrial part of east Richmond that had burned at the end of the Civil War... He didn't tell me what he had found but said it was real cool...

That part of Richmond was the oldest because that is as far inland that the James River was navigable... To our left was historic Church Hill where Patrick Henry delivered his "Give me liberty of give me death speech" and to the right was the rapids of the James River...

At the end of Church Hill there is a road that goes to Williamsburg, Va. and we took it about 100 yards to an old train bridge where Richard said, "We're almost there" as he headed up a weed & briar hill to the top of the bridge... Ask me how much fun that climb was with a sketchbook under one arm...

When we got to the top of the bridge he led us back down the old, old abandoned railroad tracks back toward Church Hill that we had just passed and we walked thru weeds and briars for at least a couple hundred yards until we came the the arched opening of an old train tunnel...

Hmmmmmmm???

So into the tunnel we went and walked about another 100 yards where there was just enough light to see that the tunnel had been blocked with a wall of concrete but with the tracks going right up to that wall...

"Wow!!! This is really cool, Richard"...

And it was...

It was then that Richard told me that he had heard that the tunnel went completely under Church Hill to Shokoe Bottom on the other end which as the crow flies was a bit over 3900 feet but the real shocker was the next part... Richard said that the tunnel had collapsed a long, long time ago on top of a train and that the train and people were buried and still in the collapsed portion of the tunnel!!!

Well, I don't mind telling ya' that hearing that kinda sent a chill up my back... But it was a good adventure... To dark in there to do any drawing but Richard still got very high marks for such a find...

Years went by and Richard and I kinda drifted in different directions but some 30 years later I had this very strange dream... I dreamed that I was a Bruce Springsteen's (who, BTW I knew in the 60s) house for dinner and after dinner he puled out his guitar and played a song he had just written and when he was finished I siad, "Hey, Bruce... Pass your guitar over here... I have just written a song about a train buried in a collapsed tunnel..."

Well, folks... Some dreams are so profound that you just have to wake up and think about them and this dream was one of them... So I wrote down "Church Hill Tunnel" on a slip of paper by the bed and went back to sleep...

The following morning I saw that slip of paper and knew that after 30 years I needed, as Paul Harvey would say, get "the rest of the story" and so I called the History Department at my alma mata, Virginia Commonwealth University, and got bounced around quite a bit until one guy said, "Hey, I know that story, there's a professor in the business school who is an amateur historian who researched it years ago, his name is Walter Griggs..."

Okay???

So I called this professor, got his voice mail, told him of my convoluted dream and asked him to call me back...

***********************END OF CHAPTER ONE***********************

(Note: I will write Chapter Two later this evening... If any of you folks want to Google "Church Hill Tunnel", don't... At least, not yet... There will be time for that... Just hold off for now... Okay???

Later,

B~